Preventing comment spam

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

The major search engines (google,yahoo and msn) have started an initiative to prevent comment spam.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

I think it would be nice if jforum could adopt the feature at least for postings by anonymous users. It could also make sense to have the admin set the permission to use 'follow' links to specific users or groups. For anonymous and other users the bb-url tag will automatically use the rel="nofollow" attribute in the url.
[originally posted on jforum.net by marc]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hm, making it behave differently in some situations need a lot of tricks. What do you think in making it some more direct rule in SystemGlobals.properties, like "links.nofollow = true", so the administrator can configure the way the urls are created.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

We just have to make sure the nofollow attribute is always used for the anonymous user. If there are a lot of jforum installations on the web spammers will write scripts as they do for the other forum software and spam ALL jforum installations regardless whether a particular installation is using the feature. If we make it configurable we have to make sure it can only be disabled if the anonmous user is not allowed to post.
If the search engines are serious about this feature then they will sooner or later punish or ban forum software not abiding by the rule.


Edit :

I have just commited a change in the cvs that adds the rel="nofollow" attribute to all bb-url code. Hope this is fine for everybody.
The change , however, is only useful for forums with html-disabled for the anonymous user. Otherwise spammers might just add a link in plain html.

Rafael, can you make sure the default permission for the anoymous user is set to html-disabled after the installation process ? I think it makes sense anyway.
[originally posted on jforum.net by marc]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

hi
Why I can not insert the image into my message?
[originally posted on jforum.net by Anonymous]