Allow/Disallow Signatures

[Reverie]

This is a tool that many people can make use of. You can share your Messenger details, website/project your working on, your hobbies and interests.

Have you thought of using signatures as an earnable thing for your community? 10 posts you can post links in your signature... 50 posts you can put 1 image? 100 posts a little extra?

I know one community I was a part of members were only allowed up to a certain size signature, but this was difficult to monitor/ to know what specific size your signature was. I suppose if a member was spamming/breaking rules you could limit their signature more/or not allowed at all.

What are your thoughts of using these features with your community? Does each community really need ability to have a signature?

 

[Uncrowned]

I am a big fan of forums modernizing and not just sitting in the past and complaining about newer sites taking their users, but I also believe that forums should hold a bit of that classic web feel and signatures are a huge part of that in my opinion. The old-school forum days were full of user bars, graphics, sayings, etc, etc. and I always felt that was an important history to keep within my forums.

I actually vastly prefer the way IPS has handled signatures over the years when compared to XF and the like, their settings to only allow certain sizes, totals, lines, links, etc. have been a massive help in keeping signatures clean. If you add a signature that is far too large, it will just tell you what is wrong like: "This image is larger than the maximum allowed dimensions of 720 x 250." and then you can just resize the image in the editor or remove it. Plus the live view of the allowed signature settings in the settings is a nice touch to go with the clean auto rule generation in the user editor.

I also enjoy how software have been pushing the ability to hide signatures to guests, on mobile devices, and in other scenarios. That along with the user settings to hide other signatures and such has been a huge step forward for me.

 

[Aaron]

I've got no problem with people having signatures so long as it doesn't distract me from the content and isn't too big.

 

[Empire]

Rules are in place for the signatures but keeping it cool for members to feel relaxed also I have image size maxed allowed anyway so that they can't go beyond the max that can put people off. But I do not mind. I used to have a rule that paid groups are allowed to use signatures space but then I removed it to all groups. I allow it but it's common sense to not go overboard and have nude in signatures is a NO NO

 

[Ravenfreak]

I never put restrictions on signatures, I let people put whatever they like in their signatures just as long as whatever they're promoting doesn't break any of my forum rules. Of course that means no nudity or links to illegal material like ROM downloading sites. As for image size, I don't really have restrictions on that either.

 

[Cory]

I've never put any earnable aspects on signatures, I've just allowed them from the get-go of when people register. Sure, people might use them to post a link in a signature to their site, but I've never been worried about people advertising in any portion of their profile. I just feel a profile is their personal space where they can put just about anything that's not against the TOS. I do try to limit the size of images in signatures to fair proportions so people don't have overly large-sized graphics that take up space in threads and cause more page loading.

 

[V0RT3X]

In the past I used to show the the signature only below the first post of a user in a thread and not all the time. Nowadays I deactivate them completely. they are far too often misused for advertising. vBulletin had a signature cache, on other boards a user can change his sig and his spam is in thousands of threads all around the forums.

Besides, they only distract from the actual discussion, just like endless infos or badges under the avatar (you can also see all this in the hovercard).

You can share your Messenger details, website/project your working on, your hobbies and interests.

You can do that on profile pages too.

 

[Reverie]

You can do that on profile pages too.

That is true - but I wonder how often do others look at profiles? Signatures you don’t have much choice but to see them unless on mobile.