A pity, but a great idea. I’ll support anything to get rid of spam cr@p.
It does seem like a good idea but 90 days does look a little on the harsh side but 60 days may have been better.
We use 90 days and 150 posts. It definitely curbs the noobs doing it by hand, but there’s still the automated things that continue regardless because they just “set it and forget it” anyways. These aren’t tough to spot by the time they hit 150 posts though because they almost always have a one-sided pattern of participation.
Get 'er done. The damn spammers are making me very impatient. SP hosts, in my experience, the single best set of Web design and coding forums on the Interwebz, but in the last few months we’ve been inundated with spammers and knuckleheads who make a few generic posts, lard up the threads with idiot comments, and in general drag the level of commentary and relevance way, way down.
Too bad a “report as idiot” button would be gravely misused…
What about a minimum post count too? Something really high like 100 so people will think twice before registering just to spam.
By the way, as a gesture of support for the new policy, I have decided to remove my signature from this forum.
The issue with postcounts is that it makes a happy little target that can encourage the wrong sorts of people to spread fluff and garbage everywhere.
We do already have some protection from bots too.
fantastic
cool 
great rules
But I hope we wont have what the cynic side of Rudy predicted!! 
That’s funny, the number one complaint we get from those sorts of people just happens to be about the high post count requirement.
Personally I am a link collector, but collecting links since the mid 90’s I am very selective on what I collect. And I have ranked first on Google for more than a year for the term
advanced semantic linking
even if that is not the exact anchor text of the link.
Personally I am on forums to give and take.
Links::: Life or death of your eBusiness.
IMO producing, semantic links can be done better by a combination of manual and automatic systems. But I see your points, SitePoint is mainly an educational web site. I have seen some of my own posts from SitePoint high in the SERP’s.
By this simple query
kgun xml site:sitepoint.com
you find a trial set of search terms.
An example of how another forum has solved the problem:
Can WPW bring (in)direct traffic to your site?
I find some good sites and pages in forum signature links.
that is the good staph only sincere and serious visitors will participate not spammer
I will draw your intention to this
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
short classic article. In addition, today I found another example of a thread of mine:
Search term
the mobile revolution
On the first SERP page: Results 1 - 10 of about 30,900,000 for the mobile revolution.
Any reason that the other hits are more relevant / semantic?
Note: it bumped from the third to the 10 position after my update today. There may not be a short term advantage in updating articles and forum posts. Hopefully there will be a long term advantage in posting relevant and meaningful content to the web in a structured form like an updated forum post / article.
This isn’t a thread about SEO.
And the SitePoint forums are here for discussion, not as a PageRank farm, and not as a traffic driver.
I agreed, many people misuse the sign link and start posting spam.I think its a good move!
I assume that those remarks were aimed at my above posts.
Indirectly it is since it is about links. My above posts mentioned examples. There are other examples like WMW that don’t allow links at all (although they are not consistent) .
Agree to that.
Then, why not disallow all links ? :goof:
Posting without allowing links is like driving in the dark without lights:blush:.
Have the rules changed already? More precisely are there any problems with my signature?
Perhaps when people sign up we should have in very large (say 100pt) bold text on the signup page something like:
*** Attention! Search engines can not see any signatures and all signatures are no follow ***
Perhaps 90 days + participation. Like at least 5-10 posts before you can use sigs.
Well my initial thought was to have the first 10 posts of every new member reviewed by a staff member to give it a thumbs up or down for quality, it would help reduce the fluff which newbies seem to manage to smear everywhere before they move on (or push their signature through). But that would require more staff available and could cause a back-up delay in reviewing posts. Perhaps we need a trust system for signatures… IE only people who Mentors / Advisor’s / Admins / Staff consider reputable can display a signature link (it would certainly kill the link-spam, but that would probably be a last-case scenario to deal with the bad guys if things got real heavy going). As raena said, time + post checks would probably result in fluff + waiting and that’s no good to any of us.
I think a good thing is to encourage more users to report spam and useless posts. I also agree with alerting new members that signatures are not crawled.
Brilliant idea Alex! You’re a bloody genius!..There is of course the downside of staff having much more work to do, or find more staff to take on the increased work load. But I think it would be worth it for the integrity and reputation of the forum.
Most fluff posts and low quality replies are made by members with low post counts. You’ll see someone in the forums with around 7 posts to their name and only 1 of them posts will be a half decent contribution to the forums.
This thread is about the user signatures, but I think the staff should have a discussion on Alex’s idea above. You know it would stop the fluffy low-quality posts from being made in the forums.
Andrew Cooper