angsuman

Four I use since 1.5 are:
Search Hilite – Highlights search results for people coming after Google, yahoo queries
Run PHP – Allows embedding php code in posts
Witty Text – Allows embedding random quote from a text file
Follow URL – Disables rel=nofollow tagging on all comments and comment author url’s

I have disabled Staticize, AuthImage, Trackback Moderate, Pingback Moderate and lot of other plugins because either they do not work under wordpress 1.5 or mostly because they are not useful to me anymore.

I fully agree with you. nofollow is of benefit to Google and other search engines. It doesn’t benefit the bloggers. I want to provide commenters on my blog some link-love back to their own blog. This is how the web works – we share, we help each other. And it also helps adding rank to relevant sites.
My bones with nofollow is that it penalizes legitimate links along with the illegitimate ones as you pointed out.
I make sure my blog is spam free, install plugins as required, monitor the blog. So I would never go for nofollow. Nor should anyone who actively blogs and takes steps to prevent comment spam.
As you correctly pointed out comment-spamming is done in bulk. They don’t care if your blog is nofollow compliant or not. Either way they will spam you. As someone pointed out before there are spammers who just want people to click on their site. They don’t care much about google ranking. If 1000 people visit your site everyday chances are some will be in such a state of mind as to click on such spam and get their fill of p*n or v*a or whatever it is advertised. And that will happen irrespective of nofollow.

I strongly think nofollow should be an option. Until then this plugin does exactly that in the simplest way possible.

[Cross-posting from another thread]
You can use a plugin I recently developed to strip nofollow tags from comments and comment author links.
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-15-plugin-strip-nofollow-tag-from-comment-urls/

It actually prevents nofollow tag by unregistering a default plugin which does it. As for preventing nofollow in comment author link, it is forced to actually strip the nofollow after it has been added by a strangely named function. Interetingly there is no better way without modifying the core code in this case.

This doesn’t modify any WordPress code. It has been well tested with WordPress 1.5.

BTW: I too strongly believe that nofollow should be an option and for some bloggers who proactively monitor their blogs. We say no to “nofollow” – http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/to-nofollow-or-not-that-is-the-question/

Lets hope the authors of WordPress add nofollow as an option to core code.

This really should be an option and not a plugin!

Isn’t category already technorati tags enabled? The technorati folks think so and also my own experience with WordPress categories suggest that they are technorati tags enabled.

I used a slightly modified code:

/* Spam Guard */
if (strpos($HTTP_REFERER, ‘ttp://’) > 0)
{
$pieces=explode(“/”, $HTTP_REFERER);
$lookup = gethostbyname($pieces[2]);
if ($lookup == “219.150.118.16” or $lookup == “161.58.59.8” or $lookup == “211.144.164.201” or $lookup =”216.34.38.81″)
{
syslog(LOG_ALERT,”redirected $pieces[2]”);
header(“Location: ” . $HTTP_REFERER);
exit();
}
}

/* End Spam Guard */

However I realized that it somehow prevented coming to my blog from any links! It is sending it back to itself. Now I understand that is what is being done for these particular IP’s only. Why is it being so generic?