[Pmwiki-users] Preventing "comment spam"

[Thomas -Balu- Walter]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:37:29PM +1300, Robin wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 January 2005 15:15, Thomas -Balu- Walter wrote:
> > In short: just add rel="nofollow" to unapproved links.
> The problem is that it requires spammers to do research and find out that your 
> wiki does that. It would be faster for them to spam it and move on.

Thats the same problem with simply not linking unapproved URLs. The
reason why we do that is to avoid helping them improve their page
ranking.

The solution will be the quantitiy of Wikis implementing this. If all
PmWikis will have this enabled in the future they will quickly learn
that this trick does not work anymore.

IMHO the rel="nofollow" solution is not as disturbing to real visitors
as the unlinked URLs in the text. I think we could even make this option
the default for external links and should have the following options:

        - rel="nofollow" for all external links (default)
        - rel="nofollow" for unapproved external links
        - no rel="nofollow" at all
        - not linking unapproved external links at all

This way all PmWikis are spammer-unfriendly by default without being
visitor-unfriendly, but the admins are free to increase the level of
these anti-spam methods.

     Balu