Should we turn off Signatures in Forums ?

[Guest]

Maybe its just me, but it seems that not only is the signature serving a useful dev purpose, but many people are using it to make big bold image and/or text advertisments, which is terribly distracting, many of which are against forum policies.

In fact, it seems that advertising in the sigs is the primary reason for participating in these forums in those cases.

Worse, we can't really police the links or ask the people to cleanup their sigs without investing alot of effort.

Would it be better to just turn off signatures ?

(Yes I know I have a sig, I added one recently as a joke on someone else, I could care less about losing it too ;)

[Drakonite]

IMO first step is to crack down and start policing the people who are abusing it.

[Guest]

IMO first step is to crack down and start policing the people who are abusing it.

I had implied, and now wish I had strongly elaborated, that this has already been done.

In the past few days I dealt with 4 instances. In some cases, I had done taken the least time consuming course of action of deleting the signature from the profile myself. However, this is really not the way to go about it, as it neither informs nor encourages proper behavior. But such encouragement takes time.

So, IMHO, I decided in this thread to re-orient the issue: absent a compelling reason to keep signatures, is it better to simply turn them off ?

If I am the only one truly bothered by the situation, I will not raise the issue further and go off into a corner to sulk...

[ooPo]

In the past, I usually just edit out the offending part of the signature and put in a warning instead. Seems to work well enough.

However, I've noticed we're getting more and more of the scene-kids and their signatures that show off what versions of which consoles they have. Turning them off may scare off those folk who only want to hang around...

I'm all for it. :)

[mrbrown]

Just install Greasemonkey and find the scripts that remove avatars and graphical sigs.