Clearly Stack Exchange didn’t take the insane step of allowing all follow links from people that had posted 13 times. Because that isn’t what Matt Cutts was saying.
Putting follow links at the current level 3 point is a bad decision, I don’t want to do it, and not giving users an option to control the SEO on their forum is just arrogant and misguided.
Becoming a reputable user on SE is hard.
Getting leader is not.
It would be so much better to make lowest lvl that allow follow link or not allow at all, a global setting because its different for each website
Just want to throw this out there, would it be better to allow follow on links for TL 4 instead of TL 3 OR and I like this better, for Staff/Moderators and Admins only?
I can’t help but wonder, if TL 3 is easy to achieve, why aren’t there more here?
https://meta.discourse.org/badges/3/leader
And if any “turned to the dark side” would they not lose that TL?
yes they would. by default, 5 flags is the maximum one can get before demoted.
Because this is – if not primarily then at least in a large part – a technical support forum and most people apart from the dev team and a few contributers come here to seek help with specific problems.
If meta had had cat threads and a “have the last word” thread and “best motivational meme of the day” threads for the past three and a half months, that badge page would look very, very different. 
Let’s look at the actual list of leaders on your forum.
http://discuss.howtogeek.com/badges/3/leader
That’s SEVEN users, all people I personally recognize, all people who are on HTG discussion every single day for months, including someone who is already a moderator and has been since launch. Some user stats:
Trust level 0: 8533
Trust level 1: 823
Trust level 2: 150
Trust level 3: 7
So 9,513 total users, of which a whopping SEVEN are TL3. That is less than 0.1% of the userbase.
If that isn’t a list of people you trust at least a little, who is?
I’m fine with adding a setting to disable nofollow here, but isn’t this exactly the sort of user we’d call “Leader”? …
From post 1:
It would be much easier to respond if you were actually arguing with my points, instead of the straw man that you’ve invented.
…
There’s a reason Matt Cutts has a job and is so well known, and it’s not just that he seems like a great guy. It’s because the SEO spam market is a zillion dollar industry.
Every single day I’ve got 20-30 emails to my contact email address with people trying different schemes to get their links to show up on my pages.
I’ve had people apply for writing jobs with me only to find out that they secretly work for an SEO company and they were trying to sneak URLs into their articles. The flow of people sending “guest posts” seemingly has no end. And then there are all the “helpful” people that let me know about a broken link on my page. Oh, and here’s the new working link they already found for me.
And that doesn’t even mention the non-stop every single day SEO / product link spammers trying to get their link on a comments page on our popular articles. (luckily I just started closing all the old topics so they have nowhere to go).
If you don’t change the way things currently work, you’re opening the door for a ton of SEO spam targeting Discourse forums in the future, and you’re going to have to change it.
I understand all that, but reading what Matt wrote, I do interpret it as
yes, you should trust these users – they are on your Discourse literally every day, for months on end, they are 0.1% of your audience, SEVEN users out of 9,500+, the tip of the tip tippy tip top. The 
elite.
yes, Google wants trusted users to have followed links to get a better, more diverse set of links
no, Google does not want a blanket iron-clad policy of all user-generated content links getting nofollowed, forever, for the rest of all recorded time until the heat death of the universe.
In fact, I think any reasonable person would interpret what Matt wrote to me in an email as I did.
Tons of citations, too – here’s a post from Matt in 2006
In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links. Let’s take the example of a forum that wants to avoid linking to spam, but the same advice applies to wikis or any other web software. If an off-domain link is made by an anonymous or unauthenticated user, I’d use nofollow on that link. Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.
And here too
Google does something similar with Knol. Initially Knol authors received nofollow’ed links, but as we gain more trust in authors, we can remove those nofollows. As I recently said in another video, if a site like Wikipedia had good confidence in an editor, you could imagine links made by that editor not having the nofollow attribute. So if you have a way to determine which user-generated links are trustworthy, that could be a more nuanced measure of when to use the nofollow attribute.
I can keep going if you like. But I’m quite sure this is the correct approach based on all the data and citations I have – and I personally believe we should trust our Leaders who are around all the time (remember you can easily lose TL3 designation if you aren’t around 50% of the last 100 days, and then poof).
Now, will we offer a setting to turn off follow? Sure. Happy do do it.
The argument sounds like those links from top-teir users MAY not be valuable considering the target use case. @codinghorror is arguing a metrics approach - the top their users are very small and they are all in good standing so perhaps this hypothetical is a goose chase.
While I don’t agree with his sentiment about javascript emulation and spamming being a valid point against this hypothetical, I do agree with his sentiment - why invest time on a concern that hasn’t actually shown to be an issue? Based on Matts comments, it may be a detriment on the whole of the web (*hence the fight for the user bit)
My personal bet is that Google’s bots look to see if it is a discussion forum and ignore links in there as a rule anyway. But I also don’t have anything to back that up.
Sounds like we should get Matt Cutts involved and have him comment on the ‘value’ of links in a discourse forum vs stack-exchange. Is he on twitter?
Yes, Google really wants us to do the job of recommending other content to them. It helps them out a lot.
It doesn’t help out me at all, in any way. The only thing it could possibly do is cause a problem, or at least a headache and something else to pay attention to down the line.
That “feature” does not help any forum owner.
The “feature” does not even help any of my forum users! They don’t care whether their links are followed or not!
So who is the feature for? It’s for GOOGLE and SEO spammers. They are the only two groups that care.
And there’s a huge difference between a person that writes for Knol, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange… and a forum user that just has to get to level 3 by writing 13 posts and sticking around a lot.
The fact that the platform is open source, and it’s a blanket approval for everything a user posts is also crazy (as opposed to following links ONLY on trusted, reputable, well-ranked POSTS, which is the way Stack Exchange did it)
Could you try, just once, to stop arguing with yourself and TRY to see what I’m talking about? Maybe try to read the actual posts that I actually wrote, with the words that I actually used?
The point isn’t because of the 7 people on my forum. I trust them, as I said in my FIRST POST IN THIS TOPIC.
The goal of Discourse is to improve the web with better discussion, and trusting the links of users who repesent 0.1% of your most avid users is indeed improving the web – by strengthening the link signal in that discussion.
I care, because
I care about a better linked web, where we don’t just “nofollow” everything because it’s easier and we can’t be bothered to try
I truly believe that avid users will produce good, reliable, useful, interesting links
I care that we have a culture of showing avid users that they are valued, and we do this by visibly trusting them with things that actually matter, like followed links
If you disagree, fine. We’ll add the setting, I don’t object to the setting existing, provided it is default off.
For what its worth, as a bystander, this conversation has been both entertaining and educational. There are two discussions here that I’m paraphrasing of course.
One is simple:
The other complex:
This part of the discussion may continue for some time and there’s not intrinsic harm in it being a more heated debate given the strong points of view. For those of us that leave the default setting on, we may very well chime in in the future if there are real side effects of the current implementation seen in the field.
I want to apologize here to @howtogeek for arguing a little too stridently about this.
To be clear, it is his site and he’s completely within his rights to say “you know what, I just don’t want to mess with nofollow”.
I think what we ship in Discourse is a) safe and b) correct and c) always good for the web. As I mentioned a few times already, we’ll definitely add the override setting, and I’m sorry if I came across as overbearing here.
I think you both have valid points. You were just thinking of “a better interweb” while @geek looks at it from a webmaster point of view.
Someone please correct me if I’m off any.
In Summary so far
OK @howtogeek the setting is now in per your request (pending deploy):
leader_links_no_followWhether links from leaders have the nofollow attribute.
Turn that on, and all leaders will get nofollowed as before. Note that the copy for the TL3 ability is not changed, however.
Sorry, I may be misreading this so I’m just looking for clarification, does this mean that all of the abilities of TL3 remained the same, but now you can override the dofollow links to be nofollow on a site-wide setting?
Yes, all this means is that with this setting TL3 get regular nofollowed links, however a lot of the copy on the site talks about how they are followed which is lies.
Ah, now I understand, I didn’t read “copy” as it written info/docs on the site, now I get it 
Thanks for the clarification.