Forum Signatures

[Cedric]

Signatures allows us to personalize our posting and adding a signature linking to your forum is an effective advertising method. But do you actually look at them and click the images or links ? Or do you tend to ignore them?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I like to look at them, especially if forums are linked to them.

I'm not joining every forum but I'm at least taking a look at them and seeing what they look like and if they're active at all.

 

[Cory]

It depends on if the keywords of the link or the text on an advertisement image entice me. I don't pay much attention to things beyond links to forums, but sometimes I might read a quote or something if it's short and to the point.

 

[Shortie]

I do tend to look at them, yes. I always find if you can make the signatures bold, out there, and interesting the more people will see them, show an interest in them and even click them. I don't always join every advertised forum, but I do take a look if I feel it would interest me when I see a link in a signature.

 

[Kale]

I use them to advertise forums/sites I enjoy mainly. I used to like having signatures made for favorite anime characters, video games, etc.

 

[SpookyZalost]

I use mine to put a couple 88x31 button links and a favorite quote or two.

 

[Syntax]

I personally have signatures turned off, since it tends to just lead to a big advertisement/backlink area (I've thought about forcing nofollow on the links in the signature space to avoid this). I've even had some communities where people got around the pixel limit on images and just had these huge scrollable banners in their signature which made posts with them hard to read through at some points.

 

[kolakube]

I love the personal touch signatures add and it is one of my favorite "humanized" features of forums. I could live without images and different font families, though.

 

[SpookyZalost]

I personally have signatures turned off, since it tends to just lead to a big advertisement/backlink area (I've thought about forcing nofollow on the links in the signature space to avoid this). I've even had some communities where people got around the pixel limit on images and just had these huge scrollable banners in their signature which made posts with them hard to read through at some points.

How do you handle community cross promotion then?

 

[Moonface]

I like signatures not just to see what interesting things could be in them but also because to me they give some personality to posts beyond just the way someone writes. On sites that lack signatures I tend to find posts start to blur together and individual users don't stand out as much to me.

 

[Heatman]

I must be very honest with you when it comes to looking at forum signatures, I don't check them out most of the time unless it's one of a forum owner that I know very well, then I will be forced to look into it once in a while. There's no doubt about it being one of best ways to promote one's forum. It's why it's used by most forum owners across any forum that allows it.

 

[Reverie]

If the signature looks good I'll look. Sometimes just the name on the graphic grabs my attention. If it is just a link, I'm less likely to click it though.