Proposal: add nofollow to outgoing links and profile websites

gaekwad · 2014-12-14 17:41:35

Edit: browser glitch – a full reset fixed it. What follows can be ignored but is left for completeness, and a reminder that I should know better.

~~Abstract and proposal~~

Right now, outgoing/external links from forum posts and profile websites do not have rel="nofollow" attached to them by default. I propose that the forum code should be changed to parse outgoing/external links with rel="nofollow" inserted.

~~Background~~

Despite the clever automated spam prevention measures already in place on the forum, there are still persistent and/or lucky spammers that manage to get through and post junk here. The posts are usually removed promptly, but in some situations there can be a delay of up to a couple of hours between the post being made, recognised as spam, reported and subsequently deleted. There are peak periods where spammers are more prevalent, typically during weekdays and — anecdotally — more often between 0600UTC and 1000UTC.

New forum threads to the Textpattern Support Forum are not frequent by busy forum benchmarks, but the ratio of spam signups to real users is high. One of the main draws of spammers to the Textpattern Support Forum is due to the lack of rel="nofollow" in outgoing links, and some search engine optimisation organisations recognise Textpattern Support Forum as a good candidate for junk links as a result of this. Some of these organisations are becoming familiar with Textile, meaning outgoing links can be added in a trivial fashion.

A side effect of these junk spam posts is a subsequent automated reposting to the @txpforum Twitter account, which comprises links to forum posts. If the spam is recognised, reported and deleted before the automated posting schedule begins, then the spam will not be automatically posted. This assumes that a human moderator is able to deal with the spam in the forum. Likewise, a new thread on the forum will trigger an update to the list of links on the front page of textpattern.com, adding more link power to the spam post.

Should the spam make it to the Twitter account, 100+ people will be notified of an update. The provided link will either resolve to a valid or deleted thread. The accompanying text is made up of some or all of the post title, which could potentially include profanity, other Twitter accounts to ping or other unsuitable words. The Twitter post can be deleted after the fact, but this requires a human moderator be available to delete the post. My understanding is that there are fewer people with moderator access to the @txpforum account than forum moderation. This makes the pool of available people in somewhat smaller, and their subsequent availability may be an issue, meaning objectionable material might be around for longer than it really should.

~~Proposal~~

There is greater value in taking steps to reduce the attractiveness of the Textpattern Support Forum to outside marketers by adding rel="nofollow" to outgoing links and profile websites. This is not without consequence, however; genuine, legitimate users (like you) will have their website and plugin links nofollow-ed. This should not indicate or imply any lack of quality to the target site, instead it just means that the referral power of Textpattern Support Forum will have a less of an impact on the respective websites.

With the relative number of administrators, moderators and resources available to Textpattern I believe this will reduce workload for forum caretakers and greatly reduce the risk of inappropriate things being automatically posted to Twitter and the Textpattern front page. As a result of this, the forum caretakers will be available to assist with support requests and do less cleaning up.

~~The technicals~~

~~It’s a straightforward change that’s already been baked into the core of FluxBB:~~

I understand Textpattern runs a modified version of FluxBB, but this should not be a significant task to undertake. Heck, if it’s something that can be done with a pull request on the forum GitHub repo I’ll raise that myself.

I am one person with one brain. Please share your thoughts on this proposal by replying below. A vote of +1 (support the proposal), -1 (do not support the proposal) or 0 (indifferent to the proposal, or other) would be helpful to gauge the responses, as would accompanying comments.

~~Thank you.~~

~~Further reading:~~

Google’s take on nofollow

Last edited by gaekwad (2014-12-14 20:57:58)

ruud · 2014-12-14 17:53:13

From that Google page:

If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.

+1 if this only applies to the first 5 or 10 posts from a user or something similar like during the first 30 days of membership.
-1 if not, because of the consequences for legitimate links.

Rejecting posts with UBB code would also help a lot.

gaekwad · 2014-12-14 17:56:45

ruud wrote #286520:

+1 if this only applies to the first 5 or 10 posts from a user.

I like this idea. I’m not aware of whether the link parser could be made to figure that stuff out – perhaps using user group types (New User [0 to 10 posts], User [>10 posts]), for example.

uli · 2014-12-14 18:00:35

+1

The brand’s integrity should be given more weight than the interests of the brand’s users. Maybe it’s also possible to leave the signature links untouched so we’d have the best of both ideas: There are only very, very little spammers who fill in their signatures.

Edit: Had the page open without Ruud’s proposal: Better than mine.

Last edited by uli (2014-12-14 18:03:42)

wet · 2014-12-14 18:08:30

gaekwad wrote #286518:

Right now, outgoing/external links from forum posts and profile websites do not have rel="nofollow" attached to them by default.

Looking at the actual parser code and e.g. the source code of your thread-opening post I believe that links are rendered with the nofollow attribute.

We used to generate dofollow links in the initial incarnation of the forum up to late 2013, and that got us on the search engine consultants’ list of “dofollow forums” but since 2014 we are an innocent victim of our past glory in that regard.

Would you please point to instances of followed links in recent posts so we could fix any missed loopholes in our parser?

gaekwad · 2014-12-14 20:54:34

wet wrote #286523:

Looking at the actual parser code and e.g. the source code of your thread-opening post I believe that links are rendered with the nofollow attribute.

[…]

Would you please point to instances of followed links in recent posts so we could fix any missed loopholes in our parser?

Oh, this is embarrassing. My browser wasn’t showing links properly in the inspector. A browser reset has fixed it.

Mea culpa. I’ll edit the OP. Very sorry for wasting everyone’s time.

ruud · 2014-12-14 22:22:12

LOL… Don’t worrry. We love wasting time every now and then (perhaps not “we”, but I do).

wet · 2014-12-15 06:17:07

In conclusion: Spammers do not check the technicalities of the sites they abuse, but offload their crap without reason. Some of them know Textile. They rather not work on weekends and prefer the morning hours (GMT).

I see three ways out:

Stop the forum-to-twitter post bot and retire the txpforum twitter account.
Stop the forum-to-twitter post bot and post to the txpforum twitter account manually.
Keep the post bot alive and get more eyeballs to moderate the twitter stream.

colak · 2015-01-19 14:08:41

I’m re-opening the discussion here with an opposite view:) Wouldn’t it be better for txp if members (not new members) of the forum had their links followed? The “Showcase your Textpattern site” forum for example lists so many txp built sites which are penalized by as with a “nofollow” attribute. The same goes with all our signatures most of which are again leading to txp sites….

Is it possible for apply the nofollow attribute just for new members? Food for thought.

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#1 2014-12-14 17:41:35