While working my way through the various WordPress files I have been wondering about the historical decision to add a “no follow” to all the links in comments. I assumed that it was an early attempt to stop comment spam, and indeed it was. However, SpamKarma is supposed to stop all my comment spam, and it has only missed one in nearly six months.

So, I wondered: what is the point of stopping the links that do appear? It turns out that I am not the only person to think this, and some other people have gone as far as to write plug-ins to stop this.

Denis de Bernardy wrote a piece about the way in which this tactic would almost certainly increase comment spam. He also wrote a DoFollow plug-in to alter WordPress’s behaviour.

Yesterday I finally installed the plug-in, and then I discovered a post by Randa Clay in which she talks about the DoFollow movement, and the fact that she has designed a logo for this.

I may or may not add this to my sidebar, but it is a nice idea.

She has also made an all-css design. In my opinion this is a nicer design too, or at least one that will fit here more easily; and it makes a neat example for students to look at and examine.

Interestingly, as soon as the page is edited in any way, the css ceases to work in this version of WordPress, because of the fact that TinyMCE is set entirely wrongly, so that it changes <div> into <p> whenever it sees it. This simple bug has numerous knock-on effects. It is, I assume, the reason that the otherwise very useful Clipmarks plug-in uses tables to style the clippings.

I am putting the original css here, so that I can retrieve it later, when the new version of WordPress has hopefully fixed the bug.

<div style="background-color: #FFFFFF; width: 123px; height: 52px;">
<div style="background-color: #FF9900; float: right; width: 118px; height: 20px; color: #000000; font: bold 15px arial; padding-top: 3px; margin: 2px 2px 0px 2px; text-align: center;">
U COMMENT
</div>
<div style="background-color: #000000; float: right; width: 118px; height: 20px; color: #FFFFFF; font: bold 15px arial; padding-top: 3px; margin: 2px; text-align: center;">
I FOLLOW
</div>
</div>

When that happens I may move it to the Teaching > Examples section.