[uf-discuss] How to avoid building erroneous social network graphs?

[Ciaran McNulty]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Costello, Roger L.
<costello at mitre.org> wrote:
>  <p>Hi Alice.  Nice page.  I would like to introduce you to my friend <a
>  href="Sally.html" rel="friend">Sally</a> some time.</p>

If a page has @rel="me" links then it shouldn't really be allowing
comments that can attempt to build social graphs.

The simplest way to stop it is to add @rel="nofollow" to any comment
links - this has the effect of negating any XFN values in the links,
as well as preventing linkspamming and all sort of other good stuff.

As others have said, this is a publishing issue rather than a parsing
issue.  A page that is linked to with @rel="me", and then allows
outbound XFN values authored by people who are not the representative,
is broken.

-Ciaran McNulty