On 4/10/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Things like this make nofollow more attractive all the time. Has there ever been any discussion on perhaps allowing a white-list for non-spam sites that we won't no-follow? This would be useful for wikis who don't want to kill all their externals with no-follow.
Or at least a second blacklist for sites that can be linked to but will have rel="nofollow" applied.
Also, shouldn't we enable nofollow for talk pages? For example, if this discussion had been on a talk page, those example links above would now be indexed by search engines and thus help the spammers.
I'm not sure how to implement black or whitelisting for nofollow... :( Right now we do our URL blacklist at page submission, thats not a fast path so we can do computationally expensive things like apply a long list of regexes... to black or whitelist URLs for nofollow we'd need to perform it at page load, which might not be acceptable. The only alternatives I can see involve complex changes. For example, we could extend our external link syntax so that you must explicitly tag links in order to prevent them from being no-followed, and the black or whitelist would control which links are allowed to be tagged.
Can a developer please comment on the idea of applying a external links filter at page load time?
Nofollow per namespace would actually be really good. If we had per-namespace nofollow right now I'd enable it everywhere except the main namespace ... you can argue that the main ns links are reviewed and are of some quality, but that doesn't extend to anywhere else.