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O my! Are you suggesting that SEO people are stupid or something? [/ot]
I wonāt even be so generous to āhintā, IMHO the vast majoirity of SEO āexpertsā I see posting here are much less than mindless
I welcome correction, but have as yet failed to ever see anything to convince me otherwise.
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I personally think the no-sig thing is awesome. Sigs are outdated and most people donāt read them anyway. Having been browsing forums for years, they are nothing more than visual clutter to me. I didnāt even realize there were sigs on this forum until this no-sig issue came up in one of the earlier announcements. lol
I understand and respect your position. But it is quite the reverse a LOT of people use sigs and a LOT of people click on them. I will agree that they can be an eye-sore but if the rules were such that they were Text only that would reduce that eye-sore effect and also restrict those weird text ones that look artsy (get rid of those).
But many people do use those as a passive low impact way of getting traffic. I donāt hound people for traffic so if someone clicks on my sig then I know they are genuinely interested in me or what I have to sell or even how I accomplish something beyond what I shared in a post/thread.
Buddy
And if they are interested in you, they can view your profile on Discourse and click on the links anyhow, so nothing lost! Stack Overflow is similar in this respect, and I find myself checking out quite a few profiles over there.
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Exactly. The info is still there if you are interested enough in someone to look for it, itās just not cluttering up the posts and offering false benefits for users that are here for the falsely perceived SEO value.
Your logic sounds reasonable however I disagree.
After studying my analytics for the past week, I get far more clicks from SIGs than Profiles. Out of 100 sig clicks I got 15 sales and zero from profile.
I donāt know how you guys are pulling in extra dollars but going from 15 sales to zero is not looking like an incentive.
But weāll see.
Buddy
That may be true, but profiles likely work differently in the forums you have sigs on than they do in Discourse. The user likely has to make a few clicks to get to them. In Discourse, you simply click on a personās username and it is immediately shown (without taking you away to a new page).
It is called a āuser cardā and it contains what your SIG would contain here.
Itās incentive for the community in general because we have had far too many numpties who have posted over the years with pointless drivel simply to get their signatures added (regardless of the fact that SPF has been nofollow since the concept first saw daylight).
Removing signatures means that people are much more likely to be here to share knowledge and information with each other (which is why the forums were started so long ago), not as a free advertising platform for everyone. We can concentrate on sharing information and learning from others more knowledgeable than others - just do a search for Paul OāB (heāll be PaulOB in the new instance) and see all the information heās shared over the years.
I could be all in favour of providing sigs that strip out all HTML/JavaScript/imagesā¦ strictly flat-text sigs (much like what I have, now, here) that donāt link to anything. Heckā¦ even set it so that sigs are strictly one font, one size, no enhancements (no bold, italic, underline, etc.) so that all a user can put in there is their name, maybe an additional line as a comment, and set it so that all sigs submitted (new or edited) must be approved by a moderator.
Just my $0.032647 worth, after inflation.
Just to be clear, we didnāt sit down and decide we wanted to do away with signatures. Discourse is set up in such a way that there is no provision for signatures, and we decided we were happy with that. Not quite the same thing. 
Thatās just visual clutter nobody will read. It distracts from the important text.
Also, here we are last week of Augustā¦ any word on whatās happening?
Itās been delayed just a little - the migration from this house to the new one is taking a little longer to make sure whatās here fits in over there. 
In all seriousness - itās the data migration which is the major hold up. There were some issues weāve been working through during testing to make sure the migration goes as cleanly as possible (all the posts are migrated, the user info is correct, the post are readable, etc), and just the small subset of data being used for testing is taking a LONG time to run through the migration - going through the full dataset being migrated is going to take a MASSIVE amount of time - a little longer than originally thoughtā¦
Exactly what he said ^
Weāre likely to be ready at the end of this week so weāre hoping to launch on Monday.
Looking forward to it! And on Labor Day weekend, tae boot.
Yes, Monday is a big holiday after a long weekend in the US 
Iām not going anywhere or doing anything special, are you?
And Iām actually talking my Monday, which is Sunday in the US.
As the venerable Robert Plant sings in āWhen The Levee Breaksā, Iām goinā to Chicago!
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Thatās an even bigger day then - itās our Wedding Anniversary. [/ot]
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Youāll be too busy celebrating with haggis and tossing caber and miss all the opening day excitement :([/ot]
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Indeed - although as weāre vegetarian, haggis is off the menu, and the forecast is wet and windy, so not much good for caber-tossing. 
On that basis, I might find time to look in after all, although Iām sure weāll celebrate in style somehow. [/ot]