Talk:Nofollow

Edit it

I wrote the article in the third person because I hope it will be improved upon by other editors, like any other Wiki page. If you know of other disadvantages, please add them. I think this talk page should be the place for the discussion. —Ben Brockert < 05:35, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

For what it's worth, there is an error of fact in the opening remarks. The search engines do NOT rank on the basis of link popularity. They rank on the basis of relevance.

History

Was this actually implemented after Google's announcement? I don't have any old source around to check. Even if it pre-dates the Google announcement, its new impact requires that it be evaluated, especially since there was no discussion anywhere that I've seen. —Ben Brockert < 05:35, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/
• http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/

Thanks, Brion. I did actually google the entire mail subdomain for nofollow, and as of the time of writing the article there were no relevant results. As usual, there needs to be more communication between the lists and the wikis. —Ben Brockert < 00:32, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

English discussion

After talking to Brion on #mediawiki, I've found out that the use of nofollow can now be set on a per-Wiki basis. In light of this, I've started a survey at w:en:Wikipedia:Nofollow for the English Wikipedia only. --Slowking Man 06:37, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

As an option for individual links

There are some articles about links with high google ranks which, by linking to the site, influence said rank itself in a potentially large way (see, as the best example, en:Jew Watch). If we could add a nofollow tag to a specific link which fits the above criteria (in which place the Wikipedia link would actively modify the phenomena described in the article in a controversial and non-neutral way), that would be a useful thing, whatever the eventual long-reaching policy might be. Just a thought. --en:User:Fastfission

Nofollow discussion on Meatball

For further arguments Pro/Contra see the discussion on w:Meatball, a community of Wiki users and admins [1]. --Davion 20:11, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

How to enable?

I am administering a MediaWiki; how do I enable nofollow? There's no documentation about this anywhere in the MediaWiki docs as far as I can tell. (No, it's not currently enabled.) Is this in CVS, and not in a stable release?

It's on by default unless you've turned it off. It's been included since 1.4beta6 so should be present in every 1.4.x release version. --brion 03:35, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Is there a way to enable this for history/revision pages only? Scratch that, it looks like it does already, even when nofollow links are disabled.

It seems when $wgNoFollowLinks = false; is inserted in LocalSettings.php nofollow is disabled on all pages, including history/revision pages. Any idea how to correct this (version 1.6)? -SamOdio 04:17, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

If you don't want to turn it off, don't turn it off... --brion 04:53, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

How to Disable?

I find it ironic that with all this discussion about disabling it.. it's not obvious how to disable it.

you can disable by inserting this line of code in LocalSettings.php:

$wgNoFollowLinks = false;

-SamOdio 04:14, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Per article based on number of people with article in their watchlist

How about nofollow being added only to external links in articles that are being watched by less than 20 people? --Pmsyyz 03:08, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

"nofollow" top and left menus

Hi there. I'm hosting a wiki ([voynich-ms.de]) and want to stop google from thinking, "Tools", "edit", "upload" etc. are the most important topics on my page ...

I would like to know, where and how I can make the left and top menu "nofollow" to robots. Has somebody done such thing already? --80.133.34.212 22:01, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

uhm - forget it. I need to make robots not even seeing the text in the menus, "nofollow" is not powerful enough to do that. -80.133.34.212 22:09, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Bug 42599

After resolving to fix bug 42599, I wrote this manifesto of war against nofollow:

“ Nofollow, my arch-nemesis and bane of my existence, you may think you are safe now, since my spirited campaigns at meta:nofollow, mediawiki-l, and bugzilla:42594 failed to bring about approval of a change in the default setting of $wgNoFollowLinks. Your friends in the MediaWiki development community saved you from being ignominously dethroned from your pernicious quasi-omnipresence over the non-Wikimedia Foundation wikisphere.

But this small setback has only further kindled my righteous hatred against you, and now I am all the more determined to eradicate your presence even more thoroughly than I had initially planned. I will take my assault on your dominion into your most fortified stronghold, the WMF wikis that were not going to change their $wgNoFollowLinks settings even had I changed the defaults. You are evil, and I am coming for you with a vengeance. This holy crusade, this jihad, this relentless war I have declared must be consummated to the fullest extent within my power.

For you see, bug 42599 is the deathknell of your reign. The code I will write to implement it will be tailored to reduce the scope of your influence to the minimum possible without utterly destroying you. You will wish you were completely dead by the time I have diminished the realm in which you are able to operate to a pathetic husk of what it is now. Your oppressive rule has survived this long only because you never met such a worthy adversary — until now!

"nofollow is a possible value of the attribute rel in the <a> markup of HTML"? Yeah, right! Your impact on this world is anything but a positive. I would say "I will kill you" but the truth is that I will only leave you brutally wounded and bleeding out of a billion holes, one for every external link on Wikipedia from which I will excise your heinous manifestations with the sharp knife of the code I will write.

Oh yes, I am going to enjoy every moment of this. As I sit in my swivelling judgment seat, pondering the many serious criminal accusations which have been levelled by the victims and proven against you beyond all reasonable doubt, and which thus far have gone unpunished, I rub together in glee the hands that will soon be busily tapping away at the keyboard, composing in those most mellifluous and sublimely elegant languages, PHP and SQL, the instructions that will bring about your ruin. Powerful servers stand ready to execute my commands, once my decree has been made with sufficient specificity; they will be the agents of your undoing.

”

However, I then decided to amend my statement to, "Fixing bug 42599 will be my next programming project. I am very excited to be making a contribution to the MediaWiki codebase that I believe will beneficially address the concerns of my fellow developers in a way that also resolves the issues I had set forth as in need of correction. While this approach was not what I originally had in mind, I feel that this creative solution is actually serendipitous in that it will more thoroughly stop nofollow from having undesired effects on pagerank that may be deterring productive contributions to Wikimedia Foundation projects. I thank my fellow community members for their valuable input." Leucosticte (talk) 03:53, 15 November 2013 (UTC)