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My-Little-Forum / mylittleforum

A simple PHP and MySQL based internet forum that displays the messages in classical threaded view (tree structure)
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Links in postings should have the attribute rel with the value "nofollow" #682

Open auge8472 opened 1 year ago

auge8472 commented 1 year ago

Because of a new posting in the project forum with several links to the posters own pages I came across the absence of this addition to the links inside postings. The source code of the posting and also the code of the corresponding function make_link made me aware of the absence of rel="nofollow" in the links. @loesler @ilosuna: I was of the opinion that this feature was already built in years ago. Am I wrong and remember this from another sofware/discussion (maybe MLF1 or SelfForum) or was it implemented and got lost somehow?

loesler commented 1 year ago

I was of the opinion that this feature was already built in years ago.

No. I don't remember such a discussion, and I personally don't like such a feature. I believe that Google is capable of dealing with such questionable links. So, from my knowledge, this was not implemented yet.

auge8472 commented 1 year ago

I believe that Google is capable of dealing with such questionable links.

Possibly they are but to be honest, marking a link with rel="nofollow" (and meanwhile additionally with noopener or noreferrer) to prevent a bot following it and to exclude it with it from the rank calculation was a proposal of Google itself.

[edit]
At least it would lower the urgency to act when a spam posting has passed the tests. [/edit]

Anyway, I seem to mix this with discussions in one or more other platforms. It's at least implemented in the Classic Forum, which is in use in the forum of SelfHTML.

loesler commented 1 year ago

was [a proposal of Google itself

I know, but is was proposed in 2005.

At least it would lower the urgency to act when a spam posting has passed the tests.

Sure, but it puts all users under general suspicion of linking questionable content. Just as cameras in public places will not prevent crime, the attribute will not prevent SPAM.