Advogato Status Report

A new rev of mod_virgule code is live on Advogato. See the changelog for the details. Here are a few highlights.

A discussion between ncm, raph, and chrisd speculated on why there seemed to be a decline in Google rankings for individual blog content on Advogato lately. It was suggested that a change in the Google ranking algorithm may be placing less value on pages with dynamic URLs like http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=191. Advogato has long had static URLs for individual articles, so I've added similar support for each individual blog post. If you click the permalink marker beside one of your blog posts, you'll see it now goes to a static URL with just that one post on the page instead of to a dynamic URL that includes a range of posts. For example: http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary/190.html. The old, dynamic system is still in place so search engines and existing links will get to the right place, of course. There's another advantage to having the static URLs to individual blog entries. These will be used for comment pages eventually. Yes, blog comments are really coming. I promise. Some day.

There's also a fix to minor foaf:mbox_sha1sum bug that was noticed by Andreas Harth.

You may have noticed that our Italian cittaditorino spammers were back with a vengence the last couple of weeks. The community spam flagging system seems to be controlling them. Most of the bogus accounts are being deleted within a few days of creation. At ncm's suggestion, I've added rel="nofollows" attributes to all links to untrusted users in the recentlog, recent people joining list, and Advogato People index. There were already nofollows on all links created by untrusted users but this new addition should prevent search engines from even indexing their profile and blog pages. With all these spam control measures in place, keep in mind it's a little harder than it used to be for real users to create an Advogato account and get certified. Well-known users aren't having much trouble and the new trust injected by adding mako as a seed has helped tremendously. But there are users here and there who haven't collected enough certs to become trusted, like pabs3.

That's all the news for now but more new features are on the way.