Additional signature changes

It's done. Let us know what you think.

so that's why when I have try to change my link from my signature I colnd't do it, I got the point now, and I think is reasonable to do this. In the end is very important to have a clean community without spam...

foottuns wrote: so that's why when I have try to change my link from my signature I colnd't do it

You couldn't edit your signature at all? Or was it just confusing that your signature wasn't appearing in posts?

nope is telling me bb code url not valid.
but i am just changing the singature.

Could you post what you're trying to do exactly (the code you're entering)? Then I can see whether vBulletin is doing something wrong.

*** EDIT
Seems other people are having a problem entering links into their signatures ( http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?p=208662 ). I just tried changing mine and it worked fine. Could be a permissions problem...

Could you still post what you're trying to put into your signature? Sorry this doesn't seem to be working correctly!

well I have a signature now but I just want to change the url that's all, every time is telling me bb url code error

I'll check the BB code permissions on sigs. I removed the ability to put certain tags in (like list and quote). I might have checked URL by mistake for some user groups.

Yep, that's what the problem was! Sorry about that

Love the idea because i do see tons of that on other boards.

It's not a bad idea.

Hmm that was pretty short I thought.

You were a sponsor so you are exempt from the signature rules. Sponsor's signatures always show in full.

Ok

I'll just have to write longer then.

James

This is odd. I just set up my sig. It shows on the preview, but is missing from the final post.

What am I doing wrong?

Cordially, David.
(sig. added manually in case it's missing off thie "Quick Reply" too.)

Quote: What am I doing wrong?

Looking through some of your posts David, most seem to be kind of short (that's not a bad thing!). The way we have it setup now, your signature only shows when posts are longer. For example, on your post here, the sig shows up fine because the post is longer. Basically, your sig shows up when your posts are more than a sentence or two.

I'm kind of thinking we should remove "feature." It seems to be causing a lot of confusion, and the spam hasn't let up much either. Spammers just paste their sig is the post!

I did notice that a lot of people stopped posting the one-line responses when we did that. Particularly in introductions - we'd get a bunch of people come in, "welcome" about 8 people at a time just because their sig link was there.

I would agree that information about it needs to be more prominent - we'll find a way to put it into the posting template somewhere or something and see if that helps.

All of this would not be an issue of people understood that signature links aren't all that valuable to search engines and it's not going to help you to spam our forum just to get your sig link up.

I'll get JeevesBond to look into that.

Thanks for pointing it out!

I put some information about the signature limits in the rules and the help section. I have a phrase ready to put into the templates but I'm not sure where it should go - where would you be looking if you just realized that your signature didn't show up?

I would probably look under the help/FAQ section

Definitely a bad idea for a webmaster forum...
More-over a bad idea in general. If you want posts to be longer, increase the maximum characters for post count. Don't hurt the user.

EGS, the purpose of implementing this change onto the forums is not to make posts longer, it is to provide more quality content. What was happening before we did this was a lot of members signing up, posting one worded or one sentence answers in threads to get their links out there.

Although it is unfortunate that we have had to take these measures which may hurt some of our members, personally, I think it is a lot better than reading or seeing useless posts and even more useless signitures which benefit no one but the member themself.

Well said, Renegade! Short responses like that for the purposes of displaying a signature are basically spam. We want posts to be helpful more than anything.

As with many of our policies, this is not set in stone. If you have feedback about it please don't hesitate to speak your mind. We want to make this a pleasant place for everyone. We do have a stricter policy on promotion than other forums might, but there are many opportunities to promote your site if you participate regularly.

So, what is considered a short post? How many characters?

Just because a post is short does not mean it cannot be informative. I think any reply that is on-topic and does not appear to be posted solely to promote oneself should qualify for a sig. Signature links don't provide that much benefits anyway.

I see the reasoning behind your policy, though.

It's not a perfect system, I agree. I'd rather not release the word limit because that could easily lead to abuse.

I agree that sometimes short posts are useful and informative. However, this is the best method we could come up with - there's really no other automated way to determine whether a post is useful or not.

You hit the nail on the head when you said that signature links aren't of huge benefit. For people who understand that it shouldn't be a big deal. This rule wouldn't be necessary if more people knew that!

Perhaps it isn't my place to comment here, but I think more than the length of the post is the length of the signature. If a user only posts 2 lines worth of information (however informative and/or useful they may be), it breaks the flow of reading to have a 4 or 5 line signature (in some cases) follow.

Yes, that's another reason why we did it. Signatures aren't supposed to be longer than 4 links, but sometimes we get lazy about enforcing that. Do contact a moderator if you encounter a signature that violates the guidleines.

Hey all, I've just started posting again, from a long sabatical from your forum (sorry!) and I noticed that almost no one had signatures in their posts. But, my signature, which was created way back in 2005 when I joined, shows up on the few posts I've made recently. Is this okay? I don't want to be "raked over the coals" for this... I don't think my signature violates any guidelines. Why is my signature showing on my posts, but no one else's is?

Yes, it's fine. Just read what we said above - the forum is set to automatically hide signatures on short posts. Yours is showing because you are posting more information, others didn't meet the word limit set in the filter.

Unless you can point to an example where your signature is showing on a short post??

Thanks for clearing that up Megan... guess I should have done my reading first!

bushman: we'd never rake you over any coals (or any of our members for that matter)! Particularly since if your signature was showing when it shouldn't it would hardly be your fault.