There is no contradiction in what I wrote. The individual blogger does not benefit from nofollow. I don't want to read spam; not even to delete it from the moderation queue. The less of my time spammers can occupy, the better. I don't even want to know that a spammer is trying to dump a pile on my web log until I check the logs of deflected spam attempts.

The fact that nofollow enables highschool antics and popularity contests is beside the point. It is not a benefit.

Hashcash in email is problematic and a long-term undertaking indeed, but I'm talking about hashcash on web logs where it is 100% reliable. It does present problems for those with Javascript disabled, but that's a different class of problem.

Yes, spamming comments to influence search engine results is a distinct class of revenue generator indeed — and one that's here to stay: there are millions of unattended blogs which are going nowhere and will not be implementing nofollow anytime soon.

Makeshifts last the longest.


In reply to Re^8: (OT) nofollow considered harmful by Aristotle
in thread CPAN::Forum opens its virtual doors by szabgab

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