I feel pretty much okay to respect their decision, it strikes me as odd when it happens because it is not often I find forums with the restriction, but it is not a big deal for me.
Still, I have been openly told in some communities they do it because they don't want you posting something of their same niche and risk it being more successful and luring their members away, specially if they are just starting.
If the environment is friendly and I enjoy my time there I stay. I many times forget to add links to advertise my community. XD
I suppose that it is their rules and they have every right to whatever it is that they wish to do however, I have every right to close it out and pursue other endeavors which is something that I am liable to do if I see something like this because really it just seems somewhat insecure of the administrator and unnecessary.
I have to say this is an interesting discussion. It leads into the question of why do people really take part in a forum. I would suppose there are as many of those reasons as there are different types of forums 😀
Truth be known I think we would find those that troll through the Internet looking for any way they can to promote their own interests, after all such is human nature. Why is it a forum owner would disallow signatures? One reason that I could come up with right off the top of my head is to keep the subject matter of the forum real and for regular folks, at least that is what I can see as going through someones mind, especially having to combat the constant onslaught of not just spam but often extremely creative spam. For a forum that only gets a dozen or so posts a day, or even 50 posts a day going through and catching the spam posts doesn't necessarily pose an imminent threat, multiply that times 10 or 100 and the task is quite daunting to say the least. Taking away advantages that are often cherished by those spammers does help take away the incentive.
Then again we come to the question, is removing tag lines or signatures from posts, or the ability to post urls in threads going to get rid of all the spammers? I would be prompted to answer that as a likely not but it may slow it down a little.
It all really comes down to what is the goal of the forum owner, what type of members is it that he/she is attempting to attract? If it is just honest discussion in topics that they are interested in mixed with a friendly atmosphere then signatures are not an item that would be deemed important in such an environment really.
Just my two cents worth, no offense meant to anyone, and this topic is more of a study in Psychology and Sociology than in forum mastering I think, at least through my perspective, quite an interesting one at that to be honest, it poses an interesting insight to the dynamic behind those that frequent forums and why :great:
