JLH Design Blog

Do you use bad behavior on your wordpress blog? If so, be sure to update it RIGHT NOW before you are blocked from your own blog.

From the site:

All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.

Please Sphinn if you will (Sphinns actual site not mine)

Recently Sebastian, a regular commenter on my Blog, moved his own blog from a blogspot.com domain to his own hosted and owned domain. Not wanting to have dozens (45 to be exact) comments linking to a domain that no longer exists I set out to update my blog.

Using the wordpress commenting interface was going to be quite painful to repeat the action 45 times, so I sought out a more scalable solution.

I went into my phpMyAdmin for the blog and found the table for comments, wp_comments. I checked out the form of the text string in that just to make sure I knew what syntax it was expecting, turns out its the full URL with the http:// included.

With that knowledge I was ready to set up my SQL query. We need to set-up the query in the form:

UPDATE the_table_name SET the_table_field = REPLACE(the_table_field,”string_to_find”,”string_to_replace”);

For this particular query the form looked like:

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url =

REPLACE(comment_author_url,"http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/","http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/");

I clicked “GO” and got this delightful response, “Affected rows: 45 (Query took 0.0061 sec)”

Now on to find any other references in regular posts and pages.

You should link to him as well at http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/

Basis

It’s been well documented that I support the use of nofollow on sites that use nofollow exclusively for their external links, such as wikepedia. However there are sites that even go a step further and don’t even allow links. WebmasterWorld is one of them. While they may have very legitimate reasons, such as not wanting to get spammed, to avoid conflict, or reduce noise, etc. I feel it unfair to use them as a reference in posts when I know that they won’t reciprocate to the many contributers on the site. I should also add my editorial comment that their ban on even mentioning specific sites cripples their help forums to the point of near uselessness, with all of the “in my sector” and “I’ve seen in my niche” posts that can’t be used for anything other than pure conjecture.

By use of the nofollow tag I am still sending them traffic, which is above and beyond their policy, but not influencing the search engines with a positive vote for the site. I know I’ll catch some heat from SEO’s who love WebmasterWorld, and I use it often for technical reference, but as I said at least I am sending them traffic.

Solution

For a while I was adding rel=”nofollow” by hand, but that got to be a pain, and I’d forget sometimes. So I developed a Wordpress plug-in that does it for me automatically, in posts and comments. Feel free to use and distribute the plug-in. It’s easy to install, and requires no further action on your part.
Install

1. Download the file.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Upload to your plugins folder.
4. Activate plugin.

Options

1. If you’d like to want external links to open in a new window change line 49 which is by default $txfx_iel_use_target_blank = false; to $txfx_iel_use_target_blank =true;
2. If you don’t want this plug-in to work on comments, then delete line 94:
   add_filter(’comment_text’, ‘wp_wmw_nofollow’, 999);

Acknowledgements

I just modified the Wikipedia nofollow plug-in by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson, which was based on Identify External Links by Mark Jaquith.