Re: Ruby Docs with annotations and searching

Hi,

As a technique of fighting spam, has the <a> link tag "rel=nofollow"
been considered? The major search engines won't use links tagged this
way to rank pages. Among others, Slashdot and some of the major blog
engines use this technique, but RubyGarden currently doesn't seem to.

I apologize if this has been discussed and shot down already :)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

--Aran

On 5/17/06, John Gabriele <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 5/17/06, Conor Hunt <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I had one idea to help with picking out good comments. Include a vote
> > up / vote down mechanism for comments. Then it is easier to pick out
> > comments that hit a certain threshold (either up or down) for
> > inclusion or exclusion.
>
> Sounds like a good idea. You might even consider having a
> "voting_weight" score as part of each user's account. So, if their
> comments get rated highly, then their votes will count for more.
> Doesn't seem to hard to implement -- just make sure users can't
> vote-up their own comments. ;)
>
> (Note: in this post I've referring to the folks who add comments as
> commentors, and the folks who scoup them up, put them into source code
> files, and commit them to the Ruby source code repo as committers. I
> refer to the Rannotate Ruby docs site as RA-Ruby.)
>
> Another idea to make life easier on the committers: when a commentor
> clicks to add a comment, it would likely be wise to have the resulting
> text field accept RDoc marked-up text. With comments stored as RDoc,
> it becomes trivial for a committer to access that same RDoc'd text so
> they can:
>
> 1. copy-and-paste it into their editor,
> 2. use their editor to add a comment marker (#) to the beginning of
> each line, and then
> 3. save and commit the file.
>
> An added bonus to that is that it gets more people familiar with RDoc
> markup. More people writing RDoc's is good! :)
>
> Conor previously wrote:
> > [snip] Maintainers only have to go through the comments when
> > they are updating the official docs, which is on their schedule.
> > I don't think they need to continually be monitoring.
>
> If I was a committer, I would not try and go through the whole site
> getting a big "doc release" full of updates together on a schedule.
> Instead, I'd do it piecemeal. Pick a module every few days when I've
> got some time, and see what the commentors have to say about it. If it
> looks like there's some good comments, maybe it's time to update the
> docs for that particular module... Hmm... wait -- it gets better.
>
> In fact, if you're rating comments, then it's only a small step from
> there to sum all the comment's ratings for a given module and rank
> them on a separate page of the site (The "ripeness" page -- ripest
> modules go at the top). This way, a committer with some spare time can
> take a quick glance at the ripeness page, scoot over to a module
> that's ready for the picking, and update the docs for that module.
>
> Hm... you'd have to then have a comment-specific flag that indicates
> if the comment has been assimilated (by some committer) into the
> source tree. If it has, then it shouldn't count as part of the
> ripeness. Once the RA-Ruby site freshens its content from the official
> source, the comments flagged as already being "picked" should be
> removed from the site (or possibly archived in the compost_heap).
>
> Finally, it might also be nice to have a top-commentor's ranking page
> (Top RubyGardeners!) and also a top-committers ranking page... just
> for fun -- for bragging rights. I know seeing my name in lights would
> encourage me even more to get some good docs in there.
>
> ---John
>
>