On Jan 19, 2005, at 1:55 AM, Tony wrote:
I can't see the point. Look at the losses and
gains:
Gain: prevents a *tiny* amount of spamming (tiny, because the average
lifespan of linkspam on the 'pedia is maybe 2 minutes - our editors
watch this stuff like hawks.
Automated spam attacks will continue to hit us along with everybody
else whether _any particular_ target cleans up attacks immediately or
not; as a target we have two ways to protect ourselves:
* Try to shield ourselves against particular attacks (blacklists etc)
* Act to discourage spamming in general
The projected gain is from making blogspam/wikispam/guestspam more
expensive in general (needing to do much more damage to gain the same
effect). Will it work? I have no idea.
Loss:
(1) extra complication to the code. (Small and slim is *always* best.)
Here's the code:
global $wgNoFollowLinks;
if( $wgNoFollowLinks ) {
$style .= ' rel="nofollow"';
}
I've already added it; if for some reason we change our minds we can
turn it off at any time.
(2) even more crud to mess up the HTML output. If we
keep on adding
"features" in this manner, a page of MediaWiki output HTML is going to
be harder to read and consume more bandwidth than a page produced by
Frontpage.
The rel attribute is standard, validating HTML4 & XHTML1. It's not very
big, and it will only appear on external links which are relatively
rare compared to the primary mass of code. Compared to the ugly <span
class="urlexpansion"> mess it's downright elegant. ;)
(1.5 has experimental code to remove the urlexpansion <span>s in favor
of cleaner CSS, with a lightweight JavaScript fallback for Internet
Explorer.)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)