On Jan 19, 2005, at 2:25 AM, NSK wrote:
On Wednesday 19 January 2005 12:11, Brion Vibber wrote:
I've already added it; if for some reason we change our minds we can turn it off at any time.
Could you please turn it off in the non-Wikipedia MediaWiki distribution?
Having it on by default is a significant factor to its having the desired effect (wide distribution of potential spam targets which will produce no gain for the spammer if attacked).
You may of course turn it off on your own wikis (as you may configure or recode them in any way). Unless we decide not to support the campaign, the option will ship on by default.
The rel attribute is standard, validating HTML4 & XHTML1.
That's true. However the values of the rel element are open to extensions, so maybe someone else already uses "nofollow" for another reason.
If they have, there's little _we_ can do about it, as we are not a search engine. Talk to the fine folks at Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
Note that as long search engines don't support this extension, it just uses extra bandwidth for no reason.
Google started the thing, and MSN and Yahoo's search teams have announced they will support it. Whether the other players will hop on the bandwagon remains to be seen (the campaign is young).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)