NoFollow Bug

This bug is only seen on bbPress forum posts, but not WordPress “pages” such as https://dcjtech.info/guides/

bbPress automatically adds nofollow to all links in posts

https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/forum-moderation/dealing-with-spam/

That is interesting. I never had that happen before. I have always inspected the HTML code of my pages to ensure that everything is operating as expected. I will figure out what changed to cause that issue. Thanks for the link. I would have never suspected bbPress to be the cause of the problem.

I am currently waiting for an answer on the bbPress forums ( https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/nofollow-on-internal-links/ ). However, in the meantime, I disabled bbPress’s ability to add “nofollow” to links by commenting out the below lines in bbPress’s code.

//add_filter( 'bbp_get_reply_content', 'bbp_rel_nofollow',   50   );
//add_filter( 'bbp_get_topic_content', 'bbp_rel_nofollow',   50   );

However, the “nofollow” attribute is still being given to the links (example – https://dcjtech.info/topic/general-unixoid-topics/ ). Are you sure that nothing was accidentally changed in “External Links”? I did not have this issue until after I updated the plugin and nothing else has changed since that time. True, it is logical to suspect bbPress since links on WordPress pages (like https://dcjtech.info/guides/ ) are not effected by this “nofollow” behavior. However, I disabled bbPress’s ability to apply the “nofollow” attribute, so the behavior should have stopped.

Once I officially find the source of the problem and apply a working solution, I will be sure to let you know.

Why is it that “sem-external-links.php” never loads or uses “sem-follow_comment.php”? I noticed that none of the PHP files use “sem-follow_comment.php”.

As a temporary (but poor fix) the below code can be added to “functions.php”.

//Remove nofollow
function rm_nofollow($txt){
    $txt=str_replace(' rel="nofollow"','',$txt);
    return $txt;
}
add_filter('bbp_get_topic_content','rm_nofollow',20);
add_filter('bbp_get_reply_content','rm_nofollow',20);

You can try and put in a Trac enhancement ticket against bbpress to allow configuration of whether content links can be followed or not. As the intention in their implementation is to prevent being a comment/post spammer magnet, I doubt they will add the enhancement.

The fact that they do provide a filter to alter the contents is precisely why they added the filter. For cases like yours where you really do want all links entered by users to be followed.

The follow comments functionality is no longer used. I merged in another plugin but it was a poor idea. Once Apply Globally is on, it is extremely difficult to now parse page content and determine it’s meaning. So it is just an unused file left in the plugin.

and since the intent of the DoFollow was to readd follow/remove no-follow and External Link’s main goal is to make all links NoFollow, they were sort of conflicting with each other’s purpose. If WP makes all comments nofollow, then we are already in the right direction.

You are seeing this with bbpress making outgoing links nofollow.