New rules for users’ signatures
As of today, all users with an account of less than 90 days of age will not be permitted to use signatures at all.
After your account has reached 90 days of age, your signature will be unlocked and you can start using it on your posts.
Why?
We all notice those fluffy, pointless junk posts littering the forums from people who sign up just to spread backlinks. Lots of those people are not even here to participate – they just post junk in the hope that either a search engine or actual users will come along and hit up their sites.
OMG, that’s not fair. I’m not here to get backlinks.
Those of you who are here to be part of our community for the right reasons will hopefully understand. It’s a shame that junk posters have spoiled it for the rest of us. I’m sorry.
Those of you who are here to spread junk and backlinks – well, we’re not here to be a free advertising space for you. If you want to advertise, use our Marketplace to ask for a link exchange.
Isn’t there anything else you can do?
Yes. We already hide ALL signatures from search engines already, and yet people still rock up with their dodgy keyword stuffing signatures. What’s more, we still appear on those shonky 'Top 500 Dofollow Forums!!" lists promoted widely by the shadier side of the SEO industry.
Clearly, merely hiding these from Google isn’t enough to deter these sorts of posters. This is another method we can use. Hopefully it will help.
This is not the only technique we are investigating.
HEY! I’ve been here longer and my signature is missing, what the heck?!
Oh no, sorry! This is definitely an oversight. Rest assured your signature is still stored in the database. Please PM me and I will fix it for you just as soon as I can.
