User talk:Fialka48391

By all rights, opening night of SF Playhouse’s The Scene should have been a disaster.

The company, which has really come into its own during this, its fifth season, had every reason to believe The Scene would in fact be a scene. They had imported a celebrity star in Berkeley native Daphne Zuniga, of “Melrose Place” fame. And they had a sizzling play from hot playwright Theresa Rebeck, who made her Broadway debut last year in the well-received Mauritius.

Then reality struck. Just days before Saturday’s gala opening-night performance, Zuniga contracted laryngitis and was under doctor’s orders not to perform. She missed Friday’s preview and was MIA for opening night.

Enter Nancy Carlin to the rescue. The veteran Bay Area actor, whose husband, Howard Swain, is also in the Scene cast, was already on deck to fill in for a few performances later in the run when Zuniga had scheduling conflicts. But she was hardly ready to step into the role yet.

So, Saturday night, artistic director Bill English made a pre-show announcement about Zuniga’s indisposition and warned us that Carlin would be carrying her script.

Turns out, Carlin was wonderful in the role of Stella, a bright, funny TV talk show producer who has been turned hard and cynical by her job, New York and life in general.

The theater’s electrical system, on the other hand, was less prepared than Carlin. The theater was plunged into blackout twice during Act 2.

The company (under the intrepid stage management of Nicola Rossini) soldiered on, and it’s a good thing they did. In spite of the sick star and the wonky wiring, The Scene is a terrific production of a sparky play that in many ways generates its own electricity..

nofollow
Preventing comment spam If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute and we're pleased that a number of blog software makers have already signed on:

Brad Fitzpatrick - LiveJournal Dave Winer - Scripting News Anil Dash - Six Apart Steve Jenson - Blogger Matt Mullenweg - WordPress Stewart Butterfield - Flickr Anthony Batt - Buzznet David Czarnecki - blojsom Rael Dornfest - Blosxom Mike Torres - MSN Spaces

We've also discussed this issue with colleagues at our fellow search engines and would like to thank MSN Search and Yahoo! for supporting this initiative. Here are a few guidelines for anyone else who wants to join the cause.

Q: How does a link change? A: Any link that a user can create on your site automatically gets a new "nofollow" attribute. So if a blog spammer previously added a comment like

Visit my форум по рекламе site.

That comment would be transformed to

Visit my форум по рекламе site.

Q: What types of links should get this attribute? A: We encourage you to use the rel="nofollow" attribute anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.

Q: Should I put rel="nofollow" on the link to my comments page? A: Probably not, because lots of interesting discussion can happen there. Also, if other people link to your comments page, a spider can follow that link and find any spam that's lurking on the comments page.

The best places to add this attribute are the actual links that other people can create. So on this page, for instance, only the links within comments and the link immediately after "Posted by:" would get the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Q: Do individual bloggers need to do anything? A: Probably not. Updating the software that generates these pages will ensure that most bloggers get these changes automatically.

Q: Is this a blog-only change? A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We're working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target.

Got more questions? Email commentspam at google.com. As we spot more areas where spammers still abuse the Web, we'll contact the appropriate people in order to keep fighting comment spam.

Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer Jason Shellen, Blogger Program Manager —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.143.176.23 (talk) 14:02, 8 August 2008 (UTC)