I recently found that a number of posters on my netbook site have been posting links to their own blogs, I don’t mind this and have always liked the idea of online communities that link to and support each other. However from time to time it seems that the sites in question are set up with the purpose of making money. I have created such sites myself in the past so I guess I know how to spot them ;)!
There are two problems with this though:
- These sites often follow rather than lead. So in one example the owner has taken some key points from my own site, summarised them, and posted them up. This doesn’t really push the community forward and in some ways confuses things for users.
- As a self funding website there is a feeling that such users are just trying to take away the few sales that my site makes to support the running costs (a community site uses up several gb bandwidth a day and plenty of CPU cycles!). As they are not so worried about a community they can push the sales message much harder, there isn’t anything to lose.
I guess it is a competitive world out there, but I don’t want to stop people posting genuine links to their genuine enthusiast blogs whether they have a few ads or no. So I can either start making a judgement and “accuse” these bloggers of spamming, or I can enforce “nofollow” on my forum. This means that enthusiasts aren’t stopped as they will be engaged in the community and posting regularly anyway, but people posting just to get some back links to their site will be put off.
It’s difficult because I have used forums in the past to get my site going. But I think it is easy to spot those who are genuinely engaged in a community and those just trying to make some cash? tbh the netbook market is so competitive now I think there are better places to make some money if that is the only motivation.
Read more….
e107 nofollow links
This was done using e107 0.7. take care when making changes to core files and always back up first. Although I am using these changes I make no guarantees that they will work as expected. Attempt at your own risk.
There are three places where links are generated:
- e107_files\bbcode\link.bb: The link bbcode is the standard way for users to enter links.
- \e107_handlers\e_parse_class.php: When posted text is parsed, there is the option to have posted links made clickable. This is another point where user’s can generate links.
- And finally, it is possible to enter HTML links. In most cases this ability will be restricted to admins only. This is therefore not an issue for me. This also gives the admin the chance to create follow links if needed.
The updates
files/bbcode/Link.bb: I wanted to be able to post follow links myself in the forum, so I added post_info to the global variables, this allows us to tell who owns the current forum post. I am registered as user 1 so in this case the nofollow attribute is not added.
global $pref,$post_info;
if ($post_info['user_id']<>1){$nf = "rel='nofollow'";}
if (strtolower(substr($link,0,11)) == 'javascript:') return '';
return "<a class='bbcode' href='".$tp -> toAttribute($link)."' ".$nf." ".$insert.">".$code_text."</a>";
\e107_handlers\e_parse_class.php:
Users can also post links directly into the forum and the parse function will make these “clickable”. This is a configurable option so you may wish to turn this off if you want to ensure these are nofollow too.
I did plan to investigate a hack to the e_parse_class to ensure all user links were nofollowed here too, but I haven’t got round to looking at this. Watch this space for an update.
Nice post, could be handy for some, I don’t get too many links posted on my site so its not an issue for me.
btw… if you set the text wrap for long words in admin >> preferences >> text rendering, it will fix the issues with stuff running out of the menu areas 😉
Ah, thanks for the tip – I’ll have a play 😀
e_parse_class.php
line: 705
Change to:
$_ext = ($pref[‘links_new_window’] ? ” rel=\”external nofollow\”” : “”);
Matt
Interesting post jezza. This post could have saved some of my time spend in researching to accomplish something similar, if I had come across this earlier. In-fact I used a hook e107 already provided(tohtml_hook) to modify the e_parse class. I made it into a plugin and is now available publicly for the e107 community.
Hi Arun, actually I noticed that no follow plugin, think I saw it a link on Twitter?! And I thought I had looked at that once.
I’m afriad I haven’t used e107 for a while so can’t remember all that well how the API fits together!