A way to help stop spammers?

[EXreaction]

And even then, it won’t stop spammers from spamming your boards. -- They don’t stop spamming certain blog software (WordPress?), even though all external links are all set to nofollow.

True.

[Eelke]

Interesting. That would mean there actually is merit in this for individual site administrators. I think I will at some point make a modification so that it works as I described above, then (nofollow on signature and profile URLs).

That wouldn't really help. Spammers will still spam your site whether you have nofollow or not as long as the majority does not have no follow, because they won't know that you do have no follow set.

Er... I know that this would not have any benefit to reduce spam on my forum, but I was replying to the post by Quadrille where he said:

You'll notice that forums using 'nofollow' tend to get a visible page rank on individual threads, rather than the gray bar I see here. Google, at least, recognises 'noncompliant' forum software.

So, to rephrase what you quoted above:
Interesting. So eventhough it will not help reduce spam when individual boards set nofollow, it will (apparently) help the Google page rank of individual boards. That would mean there actually is merit in this for individual site administrators.

[Highway of Life]

I was replying to the post by Quadrille where he said:

You'll notice that forums using 'nofollow' tend to get a visible page rank on individual threads, rather than the gray bar I see here. Google, at least, recognises 'noncompliant' forum software.

So, to rephrase what you quoted above:
Interesting. So eventhough it will not help reduce spam when individual boards set nofollow, it will (apparently) help the Google page rank of individual boards. That would mean there actually is merit in this for individual site administrators.

Okay, but before we take that at face value, it would be great if we could see some actual physical proof of this theory.

It would be great if it worked, but I have my doubts. -- Got a link, Quadrille?

[code reader]

it is most probably true that rel="nofollow" in and on itself will not stop spammers, and i don't think anyone who advocates using it believes it will.
clearly other measures need to be taken, and it seems - contrary to claims made by different team members at different times - captcha alone is not going to be enough.

however, this does not necessarily mean that rel="nofollow" should not be used.
twisi, having nofollow for all user-supplied links is being "good e-citizens", and the right thing to do as part of the ongoing "global war on spam". this is what google recommends, and i think we should listen.

[marosell]

i wanna be a good e-citizen