Wednesday, January 19, 2005 - Posts

.TEXT nofollow

ScottW has his say to all of us blogging in the ASP.Net world.

rel = "nofollow"

For those of you who can compile .Text, I recommend a quite edit to help* reduce the effectiveness of comment spam.

The class to change is Dottext.Framework.Util.Globals. Method: EnableUrls (found in Dottext.Framework\Util\Globals.cs)

In this method, .Text will look for links posted in a comment (prior to this call the entire comment is HtmlEncoded).

Before: text = text.Replace(m.ToString(), "<a target=\"_new\" href=\"" + m.ToString() + "\">" + m.ToString() + "</a>");
After:   text = text.Replace(m.ToString(), "<a ref=\"nofollow\" target=\"_new\" href=\"" + m.ToString() + "\">" + m.ToString() + "</a>");

Community Server already had something "home grown" baked in, but was updated ealier today to support nofollow.

* I seriously doubt this will stop spammers, but anything we can do to make not worth the effort the better off we are. See: BrokenWindows

The morning after

Great to see so many bloggers on the same page!

Yea, I got hit with comment spam last night, but deleted them with a nostalgic smirk. With nofollow we have the spammers on the run, but they are still hiding and now we feel as though we have x-ray eyes! Dave from Technorati is calling for a Web 2.0 which is a great idea to capitalize on the warm fuzzy feeling we all have right now knowing what we can do coming together for a single purpose.

The event should be global as I track most of my comment spam to an ISP in London. We all don’t have to be in the same room, we can host multi-locations with web-based real-time communications. What we need to do is involve  the best White Hat Hackers the world has ever known. Who knows maybe we can get sponsorship money from the FBI, they could benefit greatly from this exercise!