Remove rel="nofollow ugc" from links in comments

Question

WordPress automatically adds rel="nofollow ugc" to all links posted in comments. In our case we use comments to link to relevant articles in a website and need them to be followed.

How to remove this automatic rel being added?

The function itself is setup in the core with: wp_rel_ugc()

There are older posts recommending this filter:

remove_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15 );

However that no longer seems to work.

I would like to disable this function altogether.

I looks like some effort was made to fix this in core, but this has not been implemented yet: Prevent tagging certain links in comments with rel="nofollow ugc"

Answer 1

This removes the tag before it displays the comment on the page. I tested it myself.

function remove_ugc_from_links($text) {
    // replace 'rel="ugc"' with an empty string
    $new_text = str_replace('rel="ugc"', '', $text);

    return $new_text;
}
// Hook our function to the 'comment_text' filter
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'remove_ugc_from_links');