Comment Authors Don’t Deserve to be Redirected


Published on September 13, 2005 at 10:07 AM EST
Last updated on October 9, 2006 at 12:02 AM EST
In the Tutorials category.

One of the coolest things I’ve read in Hacking Movable Type has also been the simplest: how to not redirect a comment author link. Do you ever move your mouse over a comment author’s name to see their website address…

One of the coolest things I’ve read in Hacking Movable Type has also been the simplest: how to not redirect a comment author link.

Do you ever move your mouse over a comment author’s name to see their website address in the browser status bar? If so, you’ve noticed you don’t get to see it. That’s the redirect. I hate that. I could just wait for the title attribute to pop up the name, but I like looking at the status bar.

There’s a very easy fix for this: add no_redirect="1" to the MTCommentAuthorLink tag. Specifically, in my Individual Entry Archive I use <MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0" no_redirect="1">. Rebuild the Individual Entry Archives and you’re done!

As a side note, I’m disappointed that the books companion web site, hackingmt.com, is still not live.

This article is tagged as: Template Tags, Tutorials

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Comments

So far, there are 4 comments and Trackbacks on this entry. Add yours!

1

By Matt Roper , written on December 3, 2006 at 11:27 AM.

This is useful - thanks ;)

The main reason for redirecting to a commenter’s website is to remove the incentive to spam comments (most search engines don’t index redirected links).

This has been made obsolete by the use of the rel=nofollow attribute (http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow) when linking to commenters.

2

By Dan Wolfgang [TypeKey Profile Page], written on December 3, 2006 at 11:54 AM.

Honestly, Matt, I don’t consider those good reasons. Anybody who goes to the effort of keeping spam off of their sites doesn’t have the spam problem, and therefore doesn’t help spammers to get indexed. Sure the occasional one slips through, but that’s true no matter what.

And—as time has proven—spammers don’t care about the nofollow attribute. Plus, I think it’s a dumb idea.

3

Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins - Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks from Andy Beard - Niche Marketing.
Tracked on April 16, 2007 5:50 AM

Wordpress by default, just like other blogging platforms, has automatically been adding the "nofollow" microformat extension to all links from user generated content such as comments and trackbacks. To support the growing rejection of NoFollo…

4

By kat , written on May 26, 2007 at 1:39 PM.

Hey, thanks for this. I also had to add it to the comment listing template, (the comment pop up box) because while on individual entries this worked perfect, the comment listing pop up box, still had the redirect.
So I added this line of code, saved, and voila, no redirects anywhere for commentators.

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