Sigs - why have them?

Dean

in memoriam
In general, sigs seem to be a constant source of grief, what is the point of having sigs?

This is a general question, nothing to do with xf.com, nor any other specific forum. On our site they collect spam and other unwanted content. Occasionally they add value but no more value than a custom field in someones profile.

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On my site I ditched signatures except for advertisers and even then only permitted one single image (with a link). Otherwise it just messes up the look of the forum. On this site, I have switched them off, so I don't see any of them. Looks nicer.
 
I have them off on this site too, because the software is so blindingly fast, the difference in speed is large.

Because vBulletin implemented them and everyone thought it's the new norm.
vb did that first?

Overall, for many boards, sigs are incredibly helpful when I visit as a member. But having a blank field called 'signature' where anyone can put whatever they want, is a bit of a headache from an admin point of view. I realize that they can have severe restrictions, and ours are. But people are adept at putting awkward things in a sig which is in every post, indexed by the search engines. On a few forums I see people joining, setting their sig to advertise their company, making some marginal posts then never returning.
 
I have them off on this site too, because the software is so blindingly fast, the difference in speed is large.


vb did that first?

Overall, for many boards, sigs are incredibly helpful when I visit as a member. But having a blank field called 'signature' where anyone can put whatever they want, is a bit of a headache from an admin point of view. I realize that they can have severe restrictions, and ours are. But people are adept at putting awkward things in a sig which is in every post, indexed by the search engines. On a few forums I see people joining, setting their sig to advertise their company, making some marginal posts then never returning.
I mean in the forum world, vB is [was?] the software being compared against so all the other forums implemented it without restriction.
 
I think they give the user more scope for presenting an identity and I always allow them on my forums but with size restrictions and no animation.
 
In general, sigs seem to be a constant source of grief, what is the point of having sigs?

This is a general question, nothing to do with xf.com, nor any other specific forum. On our site they collect spam and other unwanted content. Occasionally they add value but no more value than a custom field in someones profile.

There are more things that I personally would see on the same level - and sigs are the least annoying.
 
There are more things that I personally would see on the same level - and sigs are the least annoying.
You have peaked my curiosity. Any examples?

My plan is to have all members profiles not-viewable by guests/search engines, so the things in profiles would not be as much of an issue.
 
Personally, I don't have a big problem with sigs, as long as they don't contain images. On my site, we run strict signature limits restricting the # of lines, # of characters, and font sizes. A lot of forums I frequent don't police sigs and I find it very distracting with all of this junk interspersed into the content area.
 
I'm not all that strict with signatures, though I do limit amount of images, size of font, and how many lines (And height) of the overall signature area.
 
xf-options.webp
 
On my site I ditched signatures except for advertisers and even then only permitted one single image (with a link)..

I use sigs for everybody and advertisers can have a paid ad in it. Could not do without it really.

What I hope it that XenForo makes it possible for me to:

  • Disallow an Usergroup to create a sig
  • ... but... allow me (the admin) to create a sig for an user in that group and this will be shown as the sig of that user
This... would be so awesome if you allow advertisers to show the promotional sig but do not want them to create it or change it on their own. I would die (well not for real :p) for an option like this. Really... I will buy 2 XF licenses without a second of doubt then (even if it doesn't provide Blogs and a Dutch language pack yet...).

[Edit]... some history dug up from the grave (<--- fitting word thinking of vB's current state huh...) : http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...-to-change-Signature (I requested this 8 (!) years ago. As you can see... I was desperate ;). And I realize I might be requesting something that no-one else needed at the time and now.
 
A lot of forums I frequent don't police sigs and I find it very distracting with all of this junk interspersed into the content area.

Exactly, that's why I hate the crap out of them. You end up doing the forum version of Where's Waldo - hunting down the one-sentence post amidst all the color-fonted, animated swooping dancing text and images.

I have mine in a collapse box, thanks to a Mod that someone kindly made for me a long while back.
 
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