Wikipedia talk:Nofollow (archive)

message: I'm troubled that the original very POV wording of the survey  may have affected at least one vote: "Why exactly are we doing this? It's stated right there that this action won't deter spammers". According to Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution#Conduct_a_survey, "The survey should be carefully designed to present all sides of the dispute fairly".
In the face of a sophisticated bot attack, it is disputed that:
* ... linkspam can be quickly removed.  The bot made 67 spam edits in 10 hours, and a spam URL remained in the article (PHP) for hours despite reversion, because an early reversion was not fully done and later reversions just reverted to it.
* ... spam blacklists are effective. The bot simply switched to a new URL domain with each new attack, making filtering based on previously seen domains ineffective. User:Silsor finally took the drastic step of blacklisting entire subdomain-hosting services (6x.to and uni.cc) despite the side-effects this might have on legitimate websites hosted there.
* ... anon IP blocking is effective.  The bot simply switched to a new anon IP with each new attack, making blocking based on previously seen IPs ineffective.  These were likely not open proxies but hacked zombie machines.  Some of the anon IP addresses were in ranges that are problematic to block for any length of time, such as AOL addresses.
* ... spammers will be undeterred by "nofollow". Unsophisticated spammers who add links manually might not be aware of "nofollow", but the operator of a sophisticated bot that constantly switches domains and IPs would probably be knowledgeable enough to be deterred by "nofollow" if he had known that we had implemented it only a few week earlier.
-- Curps 07:37, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Such bots will not be the exception in the future. As Wikipedia continues its phenomenal growth, the financial incentives for spamming it become greater. -- Curps 08:06, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Disputed survey statements

message: *I won't repeat the reasons I already stated in the Village Pump and the MetaWiki, but my vote is a STRONG YES. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 18:29, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Yes, no longer use nofollow

message: This says that voting is open and will remain open until February 19, 2004, but that was nearly a year ago. This is ridiculous! Georgia guy 01:14, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The only thing ridiculous is that you're making a big noise about a simple typo. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:22, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nonsense 

message: The survey opened today and remains open only for seven days.  This is obviously much too brief a period of time in which to give a chance for all users having an opinion on a matter of policy to notice the poll, consider the merits, and make their votes.  I urge that a longer discussion and voting period be considered.  There is no pressing need to justify a single week, and it is far more important that an adequate section of views be sampled on this policy issue which will affect all external links and have effects beyond Wikipedia itself. The vote on Three revert rule enforcement lasted two weeks, and its effect was relatively minor. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:56, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Extremely brief survey period

message: I haven't heard many resons to remove the "rel=nofollow". I've heard reasons to keep it (it helps prevent linkspam), and rebuttals (no it doesn't), and re-rebuttals (oh yes it does), but what harm is the suffix doing? If it might prevent linkspam, even a little bit, it's a good thing, right? 
I've heard the argument that it's not standard HTML, and I think that's been pretty well rebutted. I've heard the argument that no one uses it, and I think that's been successfully rebutted as well. And I've heard the argument that we should "reward" good sites that we link to by increasing their page rank, and I'm not convinced by that. So what other arguments are there for removing it? (The argument "there's no reason to keep it" doesn't count.) – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 00:50, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
:I'm convinced by the "page rank argument" because using nofollow essentially withdraws Wikipedia from the web, in that all the "search information" it provides will be totally lost.  And I think that would suck. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Contrib 01:38, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Reasons for removing?

message: I oppose nofollow for the main revisions of a page, but I think having it for historical revisions will mean that any spamming that ends up in the page history as cruft would be ignored, e.g. on .  Any good links should be preserved in the filtered article.  Thoughts? Dunc|☺ 22:43, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm fairly sure older revisions aren't indexed by Google or anyone else, so it isn't needed. --Carnildo 23:29, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  nofollow for older revisions?