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I wonder if eventually people will just stop allowing hyperlinks in comments altogether. It would, at a stroke, eliminate the biggest incentive for spam. Yes,
by gabemart 14y ago
I wonder if eventually people will just stop allowing hyperlinks in comments altogether. It would, at a stroke, eliminate the biggest incentive for spam.
Yes, it's nice (I guess) when someone's name is a link to their personal website or they can post the URL of a relevant article in the comments, but it's not like commenting ceases to be valuable without those features.
- cmer 14y agoIt actually came pretty close in ~2007. We were working on something else spam-related and when we noticed that big bloggers were fed up with existing anti-spam solutions (false negatives/positives) and were about to just remove commenting altogether, we realized that it was a huge problem without a good solution, so we knew we had to do something about it.
- eli 14y agoI thought that would happen as more people added rel=nofollow to links in comments... hasn't happened yet though.
- infinity 14y agoA real spammer will take any link, it doesn't matter if the link won't be considered as some form of endorsement by search engines due to the use of the rel=nofollow attribute. A spammer will happily post a million links, there will be some poor souls out there and click on some of them. Quantity over quality has always been one characteristic trait of spam. Spam and link spam were already there before Google existed and the PageRank was invented. The index of the AltaVista search engine was huge and full of spam. When the nofollow value for the rel attribute was introduced there were many claims that this would reduce the amount of link and comment spam. Critical remarks came often from people who were offering link building and SEO as a service.