A way to help stop spammers?

[EXreaction]

What if where ever someone's website was displayed in olympus we had the "rel='nofollow' " attribute added to it?

I don't know if it works for all indexing bots, but wouldn't that stop them from going to that page to check it out?

If it would stop that, and we had that on every www link, there wouldn't be as big of a reason to spam every phpBB3 board because it wouldn't help the spammers page ranking with google or any other search site.

I am sure a lot of people would love this if it would make the spammers stop or atleast make them look somewhere else...
(we have a good discussion about it here and it was mentioned by someone else http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=2172922" target="_blank )

[APTX]

Someone somewhere used an argument that it will not stop spammers becouse not all spammers go for pagerank and users will still see the spam. I take no stance on that though.

[EXreaction]

Someone somewhere used an argument that it will not stop spammers becouse not all spammers go for pagerank and users will still see the spam. I take no stance on that though.

True, it wouldn't be able to really stop spam. But it will give spammers one less major reason not to waste their time with it.

[Alfatrion]

The rel="nofollow" options says you (the autor) can not vouch for this link. A link for real uses means this link (to help some other user?) is valuable and thus should have a higher pagerank. This doesn't happen by using the nofollow option for all links.

Most users can be trusted to vouch for links. Those who spam a forum usaly gets removed along with his posts. This goes beond the nofollow penalty and only effect the spammer.

Setting that aside... I deem the rel="nofollow" pointless if you want to use this on all links. Then a better option might be the meta tag robots="nofollow" in the head of the HTML page. I think this does the same and all you need to do is modifiy some templates.

It might be used to have a better pagerank for the right pages by lowering the number of internal links that are can be followed. The man page have the most internal links and thus the highest pagerank, but may be the least interesting for searches.

[VxJasonxV]

Spam is still spam, whether you call it spam or not.
nofollow doesn't do diddly squat to stop the spam.

I'm going to post this because I really want to drive the point home.
Bad Behavior works by (among other reasons), stopping spam that wriggles it's way around by breaking web standards, not acting like a human, etc.
It uses a variety of methods. Blacklist look up, the author's personal list of IP/proxy bans (I think), user agent, and inspecting the user-agent's (the technical term for a visitor, whether person or bot, is a 'User Agent' or a UA) communication to the server.
Is it the end all be all bottom line protection? No. Of course not, but it's proved to be pretty fruitful in the Wordpress arena.

I really want to port it to Olympus, but I'm not sure I have the skills to do so.

Long story short, if you want to talk spam, read that page.
Read (almost) every link on it.
Read the FAQ, read the "Blocked? Read this first!", read the page itself, read the page linked to by '412 error'.
Just sit down and read. It's awfully (in a good way) informative.

Even some of the comments (not trackbacks/pingbacks, scroll WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down) are helpful. Seeing what people report and how.

Also, the Bad Behavior and Blog Spam tags on wordpress.com are pretty keen as well for even MORE reading.

[Yoda_IRC]

nofollow could help reduce spam. Are you forgetting the spam that is soley for the benifit of search engines? I have seen it done many times on Wikis, a user will add a number of links to their site and put it in a hidden style. Humans can't read it so they surely must be leaving it for the spiders. Its also difficult to spot as you need to look at the page source.

It can be added by hand (overload the {a} phpBB tag to produce a html teg withthe attribute set), but this isn't going to work because the bot creators will just write their bots to use any phpBB site, they aren't going to know its not going to have any effect.

It would be good if you could add the abillity to post without rel=nofollow as a permission.

[VxJasonxV]

Nofollow DOES NOT REDUCE SPAM.
Wordpress blogs, every single one (unless modded) uses nofollow, and they STIll get spammed from all ends of the internet.

nofollow fixes a cosmetic issue on other sites (search engines). However, the REAL cosmetic issue (the spam itself) persists on your site.

If you want a nofollow perm, mod it in.
But remember, absolutely. nofollow DOES NOT REDUCE SPAM.

[ElbertF]

It might help if every phpBB board has it, spammers will focus on other software to spam (if a higher PageRank™ is their goal). But that way Google will ignore every link in the profiles, even the ones that are not spam (and "deserve" a higher ranking). But if individual boards add the rel=nofollow attribute, it won't help.

[EXreaction]

It might help if every phpBB board has it, spammers will focus on other software to spam (if a higher PageRank™ is their goal). But that way Google will ignore every link in the profiles, even the ones that are not spam (and "deserve" a higher ranking). But if individual boards add the rel=nofollow attribute, it won't help.

Ya, I think this would be great for a permission, that way the admin could turn it off for everyone or off for special groups(activated ones, mods, admins)

[ElbertF]

With permissions, you can turn off links in signatures and the ability to view profiles for bots. Same thing.