somefool

somewhere in your sidebar there is a tag which is opened but not closed if you delete the sidebar from its opening to closing div its fine so have a look in there

this might be of help http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.traders-blog.com/

ah right, well I use kittens spaminator combined with kittens spam words

Im not too sure its completly resolved as no one seems very sure whats causing the problem. Mine sometimes throws up that problem but normally not.

Yes true, but atleast it allows you to iron out alot of problems quicker and easier than ftping.

Im happy to admit that I may come round to the idea that nofollow is a good idea but currently Ill just leave it off.

And I think youre right that it is the same as any spam fighting plugin out there – it is up to the user to decide whether or not to implement it. Imagine if WP forced captchas in the comment form by default!

Note btw that nofollow only effects pagerank - so the link is still spidered (at least thats what google has said). So if there is good content on there - then google will find it.

Ok, this has placated me somewhat I must admit, as Im not too bothered about the page rank issue.
I still feel though that if anything is a 3rd party issue then this is. And if feature bloat is a perceived problem then surely this is just adding to that muddle.
For me its more the point of who has control over what and how I publish something, me or the WP dev team and in this case I think it should default to the ‘plain vanilla’ option of off.
But again, I shall just use a plugin to disable it (did I read that the plugin will come with WP btw?)

nofollow will not stop spammers leaving comment
You see, thats the important point for me. Why should legitimate commenters be penalised because of the odd spam comment which might get through the anti spam net. IMO if someone leaves a comment google should follow the link through as it may well be relevant to the discussion.
Using no follow just feels to me like were moving that line further towards ourselves and laying down for the spammers.
Thats aside from it IMO just being one of Googles ideas and so it should not be in any cms/blog software ‘out of the box’.
But thats just my opinion and if it means that i have to download a plugin and install it to de-cripple my blog then I guess thats what Ill have to do.