Preventing Comment Spam

[robw]

I added a tracker feature request ( http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=542825 ) which could help make comment spam worthless. The innovation comes from Google, but MSN and Yahoo have taken up the idea.

Basically, adding the tag rel="nofollow" to comment links prevents the search engines considering them for pagerank etc.

Full details here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/ ... -spam.html

Cheers
Rob

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Actually this rel=nofollow was added nearly a year ago. It did not improve the spam situation. It does make it worthless, but spammers still spam the site regardless.

I've responded on the tracker that you can already achieve it very easy by editing your comments.tpl file.

Best regards,
Garvin

[robw]

Hi Garvin,

Appreciate the fast response, and understand s9y's position on this. Did not see S9Y on the list of supporting blogs in the google article, so when I also didn't find any forum entries on this, I decided to post it FYI. Should have known that you guys would be one step ahead already!

If anyone does want to enable this on their blog, the code to edit is here:

in comments.tpl
Find this code:

Code: Select all

            {if $comment.url}
                (<a href="{$comment.url}" title="{$comment.url|@escape}" >Link</a>)
            {/if}

and add rel="nofollow" before the >Link so the code looks like this:

Code: Select all

            {if $comment.url}
                (<a href="{$comment.url}" title="{$comment.url|@escape}" rel="nofollow">Link</a>)
            {/if}