Remove rel="nofollow" from internal links in comments

[benish74]

Hello,
I hope it's the right place to post this suggestion,
I think it would be useful not only for me, but for many WordPress users.
The suggestion is to remove rel="nofollow", only from internal links, in the comment section of WordPress.

All the best,
Ben

[sabernhardt]

remove nofollow but keep ugc for internal links

[sabernhardt]

Hi and thanks for the ticket!

At first, I thought this was related to #16881, but that is about the reply links.

Altering the rel for links within the comment content is possible already with the make_clickable_rel filter, though I attached a patch to change the default.

[benish74]

Thank you so much for taking my suggestion in consideration.

Ben

[samiamnot]

@sabernhardt ,
What about relative links that are by nature internal links? The patch does not seem to address that.

[sabernhardt]

The patch was not thorough; it only addresses URLs that are made clickable. For links that are already in an a element, a patch would need to edit wp_rel_ugc() as well.

[desrosj]

I came across this debugging some SEO issues being flagged on a site today. This seems to make sense, and it would be nice to get this into 6.2.

[desrosj]

This also looks like a duplicate of item number 3 in #53290. However, that ticket does not reference make_clickable() (only wp_rel_callback()), so I'm leaving this one open for now.

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/56444
Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53290

[thomasplevy]

I opened a PR (​https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/3825) for review with an alternate patch to address this issue.

It also, I think, addressed the issues raised in #53290

I think it addresses all the concerns and I think I have it well covered with tests. I did add a new "helper" function. I was trying my best to repeat as little code as possible across the modified functions and creating a new helper seemed the best way to do this, but I'm not sure I've implemented this in the best way possible: does it belong in this file? Should it be "private" (as I've made it) with a leading underscore? Should it not exist at all? Is it well named? Etc...

Looking for feedback if this patch would be a good way to address these problems. If it's good to go I'll convert to a patch and attach here.

Thanks!

[desrosj]

I added some comments/questions in a PR review. In general, I like the direction.

I'm not sure that this solves the issue within get_comment_author_link() noted in #53290, but the other instances seem to be addressed.

@desrosj I've updated based on your feedback and also covered the missed point 1 on https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53290 regarding get_comment_author_link().

[thomasplevy]

@desrosj updated per your feedback, thanks!

Running tests locally using the in-built env scripts and forcing php 8.1 via LOCAL_PHP="8.1-fpm" npm run env:start results in a passing test suite. I didn't try on 8.2. I haven't used the develop test suites a ton so I'm trying to figure out if these are expected to fail or if new code broke them. It seems like new code broke them but I can't recreate that locally to debug further.

I think this comment got buried: ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/3825#issuecomment-1411162430

I went ahead and dropped the PHP 8.1+ conditions in the related tests. I can rollback the commit if that's problematic.

@aaronjorbin I spoke briefly with @desrosj about this and he said he'd probably be looking at this tomorrow but if you want to push back on any of my above comments let me know and I'll make some changes tomorrow.

[jorbin]

In 55289:

Comments: Improve rel attribute usage in comments.

Internal links should be followed and it should be easier to modify other rel attributes on comments. This adds a helper function for determining if a URL is internal and also adds some new filters to make it easy to modify rel attributes in comments.

Props thomasplevy, desrosj, sabernhardt, benish74, samiamnot, galbaras, jorbin.

Fixes #53290, #56444.

@aaronjorbin I may have deleted and closed too quickly, it looked like you were done.

If you want me to reopen let me know

Sorry

@thomasplevy It's all good, you closed it right on time. Thank you for your work on this!

[SergeyBiryukov]

In 55495:

Formatting: Restore consistent quotes in _make_web_ftp_clickable_cb().

After the introduction of _make_clickable_rel_attr() in an earlier commit, the function ended up returning link markup with a mix of single and double quotes.

This commit ensures that _make_web_ftp_clickable_cb() always returns double quotes, restoring consistency with other similar callback functions used by make_clickable():

• _make_url_clickable_cb()
• _make_email_clickable_cb()

Follow-up to [55289].

See #53290, #56444.