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January 5, 2006

How to Disable nofollow on Movable Type

I've always found the nofollow tag a bit hostile. If someone's going to contribute something worthwhile in the comments here, why shouldn't my site help give their's a little boost?

Spam was a problem on this blog for awhile, but Movable Type has several other spam filtering features, and implementing them effectively got rid of 99% of the junk. Jim and Sebastian are of a similar mind, so I'm in good company.

Still, I can be a bit dense sometimes, and was having trouble turning off nofollow on MT, so I got in touch with their support staff (incredibly helpful and responsive, BTW). Turns out I was doing it right, but needed to be logged in as the admin, instead of with my user account. So if you're looking to join the revolution and shut down nofollow on your site, log in as the system admin, then take the steps provided in this tech support email:

To disable the plugin completely, you will need to go to the System Overview > Plugins page. Clicking 'Disable' for the NoFollow plugin listing. You'll be asked if you wish to "Disable this plugin?" and here, you should click OK.

The NoFollow plugin is not one you can disable on a per-weblog basis (via the Settings > Plugins tab for each weblog), but if you wish to effectively disable the plugin for only one weblog, you should be able to do this by manually editing the tags on which the plugin operates (while leaving the plugin itself enabled): <$MTCommentBody$>, <MTPings> and <$MTCommentAuthorLink$>

To prevent the plugin from being applied to these tags you would need to add the nofollowfy="0" attribute to each instance of these tags in your weblog templates, for example:

<$MTCommentBody nofollowfy="0"$>

I hope this gets you pointed in the right direction. You can find more information for the NoFollow plugin in the User Manual:

http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.2/k_preinstalled_plugins/nofollow/

Tried the first bit of advice, and it worked a treat. I had tried editing the code with the nofollowfy="0" thing earlier, and it didn't work, but that was before I logged in as Admin, so that could have been the problem.

Update: Mutha! After all that, I see they're still redirecting those comment links through my own server. MT is really intent on protecting me from myself, apparently. Oh well, back to customer support...

Update: Just to clarify, the hack above does remove nofollow. However, it doesn't deal with MT redirecting comment links through my own server. That'll be the topic of another post.

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