Server-side Swift is invisible. Can we allow accredited users to post nofollow-less links?

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Google considers this site a high-reputation domain. like all forums, this site automatically nofollow s all outgoing links to discourage spam.

However, this makes it hard for people writing educational resources for swift, especially server-side swift, to get their contributions in front of the rest of the community, as they do not appear in search results. Almost all incoming links come from GitHub or these forums, which are worthless.

For the more obscure parts of swift, like server-side swift, the situation is so bad that even official SwiftNIO guides are effectively non-indexed. i’m sure anyone who’s written a decent amount of SwiftNIO code has learned to use the site: prefix if they want to find symbols in the API docs. Again, this is because server-side swift users tend to congregate on these forums, or on GitHub, so Google considers us irrelevant.

From the standpoint of swift educators, the only viable publishing models are

  1. Ad-supported
  2. Paywalled

Right now, option 1 is impossible because of the nofollow situation. So most serious authors use option 2 (either directly, or through a 3rd party like raywenderlich), which is bad for the language, and bad for the community. Can we allow accredited users to post nofollow-less links?

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Thank you for bringing this up! I always wondered why the situation is so bad and had no idea this was because of the nofollow :exploding_head:. CC @server-workgroup

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Merciless macaroni and cheese! (To coin a phrase.) That explains a lot of things... :flushed: I heartily echo @johannesweiss's thanks!

As for solutions, I have to imagine Discourse has some facility for configuring how nofollow is and isn't applied - paging @mishal_shah!

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cc: @Nicole_Jacque

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