One of the useful privileges of Discourse Trust Level 3, remove automatic nofollow

While many here may not be concerned with their Discourse Trust Level, some may find that earning Trust Level 3 grants

Have all their links followed (we remove automatic nofollow)

to be a desired privilege. (Technical details)

In other words if you use links in your post so that Google will index them and allow others to find what you link when using Google, until you reach TL3, Discourse it telling Google with rel="nofollow" that your links are not of importance, so do not index them.

Admins have a stats page available to them to see your progress to a trust level, e.g.

If you want to know your stats, just private message me and I will send them back to you.


Side note.

Discourse Meta post: Google will be treating nofollow links differently

Google post: Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

I don’t know how this will change with Discourse, or how it will change with your links being indexed here, but better informed than not.

It seems that if you want Trust Level 3:

  • Read articles on the website, not just in your email.
  • If you like a response, be sure to click on the “like” icon (this won’t help your trust level but will help other people’s).

Why do you say that?

To reach certain trust levels you have to have a minimum number of likes given.
Also the stats are calculated within a moving 100 day window. If you don’t keep your stats up you can lose TL3.

FYI for all

Currently the Likes Given and Likes Received to reach TL3 are at the default when the site was created, these can be changed by an admin. Discourse Meta had a discussion about the values. Heads up – adding likes given/received as trust level 3 criteria

Also be aware that while you can see counts of stats such as Likes Given in your public profile, the counts in your public profile may be greater than those used for TL3 calculation because the TL3 calculates the requirements using the last 100 days.

In other words, a like created more than 100 days ago does not count toward earning/keeping TL3.

I find the nofollow on links to be strange. It’s mainly to prevent spam influencing page rank. But spam is unlikely in our group; it’s best to let Google/Bing/whatever figure out how to weight links rather than trying to apply crude adjustments.

References:


1 Like

Yes, I agree. That is why Google is changing it as noted in the link provided in an earlier post