YaBB nofollow - forum modification

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I have a YaBB forum where visitors posting messages may include references to urls in their postings.  These urls may be made into active links by me, the administrator, if I set a parameter autolinkurls to enable.   The problem with this is that once activated, people are tempted to spam the forum by putting all kinds of references to web sites thinking that it will bring them a higher page rank in Google.  Many other forums and guest books have similar problems with what is called "comment spam".  Google have come up with a way of fixing this. 
 

YaBB nofollow modification to forum source file

As far as the YaBB forum is concerned in order to implement the new code you need to do the following:

Find the file called YaBBC.pl and make a back up copy of it.  The back up copy may be used if your amendment is unsuccessful or causes problems and you need to back out to your original configuration..

Edit the YaBBC.pl file using a text editor.

Find the line that says: if( $autolinkurls ) {
There are two long lines immediately following this that generate the html code that goes into the displayed posting text. Modify both lines in the same fashion.
Insert  rel="nofollow" like so, in both line:
<a href="$2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
<a href="$2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">

After you have made the YaBB nofollow modification, check that your YaBB Forum still works.  You need to go to the YaBB admin settings and make sure that Enable Bulletin Board Code and Auto-link URLs are both ON.   Look for postings that include url references and note that they should be underlined and active.  View the source and check that rel="nofollow" is now included.    Please send me any comments. eric@satsig.net     If this works, it will be helpful in discouraging comment spam.

A further modification to consider is the YaBB title, description, keywords meta modification

► Page created 13 March 2005, last amended 8 June 2008  Eric Johnston   Back to SEO advice and suggestions
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