Ferodynamics Network

popular: profile privacy, mobile privacy

March 1, 2008

Do-follow or no-follow? is it important which you choose, as long as you are open about it? I’ve made changes to this blog that are more extreme than either choice in the hope that it will help with the debate.

What have I done? I have removed the links from commenters’ names altogether.

You read that right. Comment here in the near future and you are guaranteed to get no link love at all.

The URLs are not gone, they are just displayed in plain text now so you can copy and paste to visit the commenter’s blog if you want to.

Am I mental? Perhaps. I want to see what happens, nothing more.

Will it stay this way forever? Probably not, that really depends on the response. That’s the point.

There is a poll (if you don’t want to comment) and and open comment thread on the comment policy page. Let me know what you think.

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  updated 1 seconds ago
Tuesday, 4am
Six Ways to Tell Your Readers Apart Through Comments | The Reader Appreciation Project

[...] a commenter’s name as well as a URL is another way to help distinguish between commenters. Many commenters might have the same name [...]

Thursday, 6am
inspirationbit

I don’t mind no linked names at all. That’s not the reason why I comment on people’s blogs. But like Louis, I prefer to have a clickable link, instead of select+copy+past – just being lazy here ;-)

It is an interesting experiment nevertheless. Curious to see the results and findings.

Monday, 12am
Poll: Turning Off Links in Comments » Reader Appreciation Project

[...] Rather than decide whether to implement Do-Follow or No-Follow in his comment’s section, he has decided to turn off links completely. [...]

Sunday, 4pm
Andrew Rickmann

Thanks Louis,

There is every chance that it won’t work with cocomment, but I don’t know how it works so I can’t say for sure.

Sunday, 1pm
Louis Liem

I don’t mind no-following at all. but i prefer a live link (nonfollowed) than a plain text. it saves a bit of microcalories for extra clicks and paste it to my address bar.
off topic: does your comment section work with cocomment? i don’t see my cocomment here…

Sunday, 11am
Andrew Rickmann

Thanks Ronald,

I was thinking about using some Javascript to make them clickable but I thought I would go for something a little more extreme for the purposes of the debate.

Sunday, 8am
Ronald @ RA Project

Now that I’ve seen your implementation, I quite like it. Not sure what’ll happen with long URLs though :)

Maybe perhaps a little DOM implementation where when a user hovers over it, it changes into a clickable link.

Sunday, 7am
Ronald @ RA Project

I’ll definitely be following this and perhaps doing a quick case study on the potential of de-linking commenter’s names in the section.

It’s a good idea in a sense of eliminating do-follow and no-follow from the equation.