I came to think of this since the WikiPedia encyclopedia has recently announced they are adding the nofollow attribute to all their outgoing links. Also, in my instance of the (excellent, I might add) my little forum there are people making sure to add links to their personal pages, presumably in order to increase their pages' page ranks.

Going through the code (I think I'm using v1.6) I added the rel="nofollow" attribute to the make_link function, but it didn't really change anything. I haven't looked further, but thought perhaps "nofollow" is a feature that administrators would like to be able to add to their forums...?

The obvious pro of adding such a feature is that you avoid the people "spamming" the forum with unnecessary links. A possible con is that pageranks are somewhat "tampered" with and no longer reflects real importancy of sites (if they ever did).

Per Bylund