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Nofollow Changes in the Forum

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, May 16, 2006
18 years ago3,527 views

The following change regarding the nofollow attribute is now implemented in the forum ("nofollow" is a kind of link condom to be used for untrusted/ unchecked links):
- within the first week of a link being posted, the link is "nofollow"
- if the link hasn't been removed after a week, it means it's trusted and the "nofollow" is removed

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Is this retroactive?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Yes, all old links automatically turned to "normal" links.

Search-Engines-Web.com [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Can contributors add their Link Sigs

or do something to get a ink to their homepage

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Philipp- in the context of "no follow" – how will you define "trusted" ?

A link could be a genuine link that points to a good webpage- however the page may not have content in the context of the thread. So would make it a "no follow" not to be trusted url ?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

When your page contains something relevant to the discussion, of course please post it here as usual, otherwise the forum rules still stay the same and the top Google result for the nickname acts as a sort of signature. I'm doing this to better filter spammers who are not seriously interested in the discussion – I'm deleting about a dozen or more spam posts a day and many of them go like this:

--------------
Great post, I agree.
www.freewebhostingandstuff.com
--------------

Once I allow signatures I will need to check each and every page and then carefully balance whether or not the comment was posted to merely advertise a page in the signature, or to add to the discussion.

Whenever I use any news from the forum, as usual, I will credit the person with a link. Usually the only times I use nofollow on the front-page is when the page in question is SEO-related and I don't know it well.

Travis Harris [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

/pd, my understanding was that any link that survives a week will have the nofollow removed. Seems simple and fair.

hee hee.... now my minecleaner might actually show up in a Google search!

(not linking here because I don't want to be an abuser!)

Search-Engines-Web.com [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Could you consider giving the already Trusted posters SIGs or allowing some sort of link – even on the profile page – they have proved themselves, and the algo benefits could help somewhat on GYM.

The beauty of this is that one great post or piece of info – helps THOUSANDS – 99.999% of whom NEVER say "Thank You"

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Philipp, I agree with Search-Engines-Web.com – you could allow those who have "person icons" the ability to create sigs since these are generally trusted and active contributers. Of course, I don't mind the current method as my website appears on my page, but I'm sure not everyone uses a user name that will return their webpage (in the top result) when you lookup their name on Google.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Personally, I really dislike signatures. They just bloat the page. Also, once people are free to put whatever they like in the signatures, it can really ruin the flow of a thread and even a whole forum. (I've seen forums where the signatures are generally longer than the posts... and that's bad!)

However, I do like the idea of people have a profile page. Perhaps it should be possible to claim a name too. For example, nobody can post as Philipp (apparently – although I've never tried in case the Blogoscoped Police hunt me down) – shouldn't it be possible for the "trusted posters" to also have this kind of protection?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I'll see how I can optimize the "top link for nickname..." functionality. Right now in special circumstances – like for /pd's nickname not returning Peter's page – I tweaked the code to link to a certain page. I will check into this and add some caching for the Google URL for starters.

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I would agree with what Tony said. I think that implementing signatures on this forum would not be to the benefit of it. Especially since the writing is so big here (a good thing) which would mean signatures would take up lots of space.

Claiming names seems a bit strange with the no log on policy. You claim your name... then another Tony Ruscoe comes along... then what? They would just post as you.

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Like the idea about the prfile pages. So I could have my photoblog link there instead of a link to another website I have nothing to do with. :(

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

While we're tossing out suggestions, I'll add another – just an idea for discussion. For the profile page, if there could be some kind of grouping of comments by thread or something...I sometimes want to check a few threads I commented in to see who may have responded, and there's not a real easy way to do that currently as 3 consecutive posts on that page may have been to the same thread.

I do like the simplicity in listing how long ago each of your posts were (5 minutes ago | 1 hour ago, etc.)...I don't know if you could implement this suggestion without adding some complication to that.

Sunil Nair [PersonRank 9]

18 years ago #

Niraj, I had earlier suggested thread-specific RSS feeds that can be subscribed to, to do exactly what you described. I might also mention that this would be useful whether or not one leaves a comment, but just to follow a discussion on a topic of interest. Not being a hard-core techie, I don't know how simple or complex this really is...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Improving the "past posts" readability in the profile page is an interesting suggestion.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

If you do decide to change around the profile page, feel free to make me your guinea pig :)

fenissen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

hi all
i just want to check this forum...i don't know how to use it's options, for example ubb, but i'll study...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Fenissen, there are no special formatting options in this forum, URLs will automatically turn to links when they're surrounded by spaces.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Philipp, I love the new profile pages! That's exactly what I was hoping for :)

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

My only final suggestion would be to put the thread name in there, so it'd look like:

Philipp, I love the new profile pages! That's exactly what I...
1 minute ago in "No Follow Changes in the Forum"

so that you could easily tell which the most recent threads you participated in.

alek [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Ummmm ... maybe I missed it earlier on the profile pages, but that looks really, really nice as I can kinda see what I have at least commented on so I can more easily circle back to see if any responses.

Not sure how much cookie tracking you are doing, but major bonus would be some highlighting method that would show if there have been new comments since I last read the thread.

Pretty soon Philipp you'll be install VBulletin! ;-)

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

actaully have you thought of th bbPHP for a forum Philipp ??

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

/pd, would that compromise the current look? What I like about this custom forum is its simplicity, functionality, and most importantly its uniqueness. It doesn't look just like every other forum, and yet it is extremely easy to use.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I agree Niraj- this forum is class above others, withbbPHP it woudl certainly change and UI may scare someone.. maybe Philipp needs to begin thinking of opening his ow opensource forge project and throw the codebase in their to promote this type of space within blogsphere.

Technically speaking, this is quite a unique platform, within a paradigm of a blogs!!

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I'd be reluctant to release code that took such an amount of time and effort to create...especially true because my own page (http://www.nirajsanghvi.com) is similar to Philipp's in that I wrote it from scratch...blog, story submissions, commenting system, and all. Of course I also probably have some messy code :)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I'd probably have to release something from scratch to make it open-source-worthy (the forum + blog grew heavily in features and were added to and merged on day-to-day basis). I already created more lightweight blogging tools in the meantime, in use at e.g. http://schlechtbedient.de , if anyone wants the source to that email me. Maybe one day I'll rewrite this blog + forum from scratch for a release. But I suppose the most time went into finding out best design patterns for this blog – so those can be easily copied now even without having the source.

By the way, I don't want to switch to another software like phpBB. A lot of thinking goes into specific design features you'll see here – "don't make me think" and "don't make me read" and "don't make me register yet another service" and "don't make me type unnecessary stuff" are the interface guidelines – so it's good when I can change every interface issue with full control here. That being said of course it's good to be inspired partially from features other boards have.

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

The new profile pages are great indeed. If only we could customise the first link, it would be even greater. The Google result that is shown has nothing to do with the real Art-One ;-)))

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