Site news: Comment links no longer use the MT redirect
by Volker Weber
I meant to fix this for a long time. With MovableType 2.66 SixApart changed the behavior of the CommentAuthorLink tag. Instead of adding an href to the site of the comment author, it linked to a cgi-script that redirected to the site. This change was designed to discourage the use of comments to obtain Google juice. However most spammers put their links directly into the comments body. Since I weed them out anyway with MT-Blacklist, I wanted the old behavior back, that linked comments directly to their own website.
David Raynes Optional-Redirect v0.1 to the rescue:
I upgraded to MT 2.661 now, but I was not too sure about whether I wanted to use the new redirect "feature" for the MTCommentAuthorLink, so I wrote up this little plugin. Install it like any other plugin, and the MTCommentAuthorLink tag now takes a new argument, redirect. If set to 1, the redirect feature is used, otherwise, the old style behavior is used (I ripped the code directly out of MT 2.64).
I encourage others with MovableType to do the same. I actually want commentators to earn Google juice. ;-)
Comments
Cool -- this reminded me to check for the same thing in MT 3.1, and it turns out it has native support for this with a "no_redirect=1" option to the MTCommentAuthor tag. Rebuilding my weblog as I write this ...
Thanks for reminding me to do this... I'm rebuilding now, too.
mmmmh. good ;-)
/k
