panthermachina

I don’t get it, why are people so adamant about not having an option to turn this off?

It’s a simple toggle, with no-follow being on by default. It’s a simple switch and it is enough to make everyone happy, but yet such a simple compromise won’t be agreed to. There are valid points on both sides so the action should be compromise, not “take it or leave it.”

If all comments are no-follow, then what your saying is that you want blogs to be link whores and go onto different services whoring links to themselves, and pinging all services so that people can read them. For the sites with good content, you’ll never find them because the thoughtful comments they have left on the blogs of other people won’t count towards good karma for them. So basically if I went searching for stuff on ham radio development and never come across an author with excellent content about them because they don’t advertise, they don’t whore their link out and they don’t go out of their way to drive traffic to their site.
Basically this creates a system where people don’t get just rewards for meaningful content. Sure, you could link to thier blog, but if your blog is about things like Web content development and theirs is about ham radios, why would you? The two aren’t remotely connected and you aren’t interested in the subject matter, you just punish everyone who is when they do search for material on ham radios.

What about those that don’t make useful comments, people that are out there comment spamming and whoring for links. These are the ones we want to protect against, right? Well, why not delete their comments? Or better yet, why not turn comments off completely? No comments has the same effect on comments that no-follow does, with you having no need to check your site’s comments to make sure that no one is spamming your site. If our one true fear is comment spam, so much so that everyone else should suffer, why not turn off comments completely?

I don’t like no-follow, it’s a bandaid for a problem that won’t necessarily stop just because they don’t get pagerank anymore. It’s a solution to a problem that should has been allowed for from the start. Every blogging system has tools for moderation, link validation, and controlling comments, why is it that suddenly google announces no-follow and everyone jumps up and down as if this will solve the problem of comment spam once and for all? It won’t only three major search engines are implementing it, it doesn’t hurt already gained page ranks from comment spamming, it isn’t implemented in the multitude of other search engines out there, including that of AOL.

Looks like daringfireball.net to me. The changes are merely that you inverted the colors and don’t have your own header image.

I don’t mind it at all, but I would like a copy of that template to save me the trouble of ganking John Gruber’s layout myself for yet another alternate layout on my own blog.

To add onto the other votes for discretionary control over the nofollow attribute: I’d like to point out that the blogs I comment on, I do so because they interest me and have something useful to say. I might also trackback to these same discussions on my blog, so why should I be punished because I have something actually worthwhile to say on the topic?

I’m not comment whoring like some may think but commenting and browsing like everyone else does. If all I wanted was PageRank I would join the different pingers and whore them for hits and rank, instead I just want people that are interested in the same topics I am, to eventually browse to my site/blog.

I do like the idea that we could have such finer controls over it as to decide that those that registered on your blog aren’t flagged, or that those that are in our friends or links list should also not be flagged, but where is the off button? We can turn most features off, why doesn’t this come with one? And I talking directly about 1.5 since this is a plugin so it’s optional.

I’m of the opinion that this is a nice feature to have, but not something that should be on by default. My site has yet to ever have a spam comment go live and they all sit in moderation till I hit delete.

However the people that read my blog and post to it are doing me a service by commenting, so why would I not give them something in return like a link back and free rank boost?

When I post on other people’s blogs I’m not creating spam, I’m posting my viewpoint to be shared with people, and if people like it they click through for other things that I’ve said on other subjects. If all goes well, then the incestous blog community works and my blog gets more popular while the people whose blogs I comment on also get more popular, everybody wins and when I search for my name, I get ranked higher.

Again, there is nothing wrong with this, but rather than punish everyone indiscriminately why not instead allow users to choose to let thier commenters get some google love?

Ok, I have found a good avenue for this hack to work, but I need some input as to what this field is actually used for. In the wordpress database comments have a comment_type field that is basically blank for all comments. It allows varchars up to a length of 20, so I was planning to mark comments as guest/user/author and then I would have something I could flag them by that didn’t rely on matching words.

So, does anyone know what the field is used for, or planned to be used for?

Thanks again IronCladBurrito, but these methods were already mentioned and both rely on some special name/email duo to do it, but the second link is promising in that it mentioned the actual ID system, which might be a good place to start to get this hack written.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. Feel free to post anything else you guys think might be helpful.

It was promising, but sadly it doesn’t help since that weeds them out way earlier than I need. Basically I can use something like that to change the comments page inputs automatically, but I still have no way to set a special “I’m an author” flag, or even a “I’m a registered user” flag, for when I parse the comments for display.

yes, bur more importantly, I was making a style and wanted some way to check whether the poster was the author since I want to flag that differently from the other comments.

Also even though it may have your info already, that info isn’t *special* in some way that you can reliably say that “This is the author” of this thread. For example I can’t do it by ip since I might be replying on the go, I can’t do it by name and website/email since someone else could just type in the same info. Basically I just want to do something like NSlog.com or BinaryBonsai.com, the former is MT, but the latter is wordPress and even though he has it working in his theme, I’m trying to get a generic way of asking whether comment_author() == post_author().

Any ideas?

Okay, I cleared all my cookies, then logged into the wordPress admin page. I went to a page to comment, nothing was filled in and when I typed in without filling anythign in, I got labeled as Anonymous.

Am I missing something? Is there something I need to set?

The blog in question is https://matrixPointer.com/karl