Signatures blocked

**realestate** · Apr 21, 2005, 01:09

Sitepoint signatures invisible to robots. Is this a good thing?
I expect a response like "we are doing this to increase quality of posts".

**someonewhois** · Apr 21, 2005, 03:10

Eh? They aren't invisible to the SE's, they're showing up in the cache just fine...

**asp-hosting.ca** · Apr 21, 2005, 07:14

Originally Posted by realestate

Sitepoint signatures invisible to robots. Is this a good thing?
I expect a response like "we are doing this to increase quality of posts".

What makes you think the signatures are not visible to the SE bots?

**realestate** · Apr 21, 2005, 07:59

If you are not logged on, signatures don't appear. It is a very new thing, so caches don't give any info.

**Golgotha** · Apr 21, 2005, 08:08

that's a pretty good idea, is that a SP mod or a VBulletin mod?

**Cyclone** · Apr 21, 2005, 08:25

Yes, the signatures are not visible to the SE bots since a few days. (To the moderators) Please make them visible again. Please please please.

**Ogito** · Apr 21, 2005, 08:57

is there any reason the Moderators/Administrarors to hide the signatures?

**Christoph** · Apr 21, 2005, 09:31

Signatures in many vBulletin forums are not spidered if the "Archive" function is turned on. Only links within the posting itself are being spidered. So, I do not see too much of an issue with the change (if it is a change indeed).

Christoph

**vgarcia** · Apr 21, 2005, 09:45

Originally Posted by Ogito

is there any reason the Moderators/Administrarors to hide the signatures?

We do it out of love

Just kidding. Honestly I didn't even know about this (moderators don't run the technical side of the forums).

**Mike** · Apr 21, 2005, 09:55

I just found out about it because of this post actually

**stymiee** · Apr 21, 2005, 10:17

Same here

**Dean C** · Apr 21, 2005, 10:27

Kind of a shame. Good posters should get their link there as a reward

**Dark Tranquility** · Apr 21, 2005, 11:44

Originally Posted by Dean C

Kind of a shame. Good posters should get their link there as a reward

Lol I agree Dean I agree

but is that technically possible ? lol I doubt

**cfm** · Apr 21, 2005, 12:10

Here the argument could go both ways, in favor of public signatures and against them. I don't care much about my signature, because I don't really care what search engines think of my sites. Still, a community with a member base as reliable and upstanding as SitePoint's shouldn't have to worry about whether members are spamming or posting simply to get incoming links.

**Bleys** · Apr 21, 2005, 12:15

This is all news to me, as well.

*makes a note to ask mmj about it*

**Matt Mickiewicz** · Apr 21, 2005, 16:12

As most of you know, over the past few weeks our server has come under increasing stress from the huge volume of visitors to these Forums and SitePoint. While we are working on a long-term solution, we've taken many, many measures to improve performance for vBulletin (including removing search functionality for non-logged in users) but none of them have been sufficient to eliminate lag time during peak periods.

As such, we've decided to remove signatures for non-logged on members, which has actually reduced server load for us by a couple percentage points for us. So, while I understand that this is an inconvinience, logged in members will continue to be able to view your signatures, visit your Websites, check out the work you've done, ad placements you've used, scripts you've implemented, etc. etc. etc.

This was a tough decision for us, and one we didn't take very lightly, but given the choice between limiting the number of Forum visitors at any one time and removing signatures, we decided that this would cause the least inconvinience.

**someonewhois** · Apr 21, 2005, 16:15

Oh. So you HAVE disabled it.

That kind of sucks.

Will you let us know when (that is, if you ever) reenable it? For now I guess I may as well remove the a|b|c|d|e in my signature. Oh well.

**RetroNetro** · Apr 21, 2005, 16:37

Originally Posted by someonewhois

Oh. So you HAVE disabled it.

That kind of sucks.

Will you let us know when (that is, if you ever) reenable it?

Yeah is this gonna be changed back when you get the server issues solved?

**SRTech** · Apr 21, 2005, 16:40

Thanks for explaining what happened. I was wondering what was going on.

Hope you can get your server issues worked out soon.

**Dean C** · Apr 22, 2005, 02:43

Yeah it's kind of a shame. It's nice to have our links in the search engines

**M. Johansson** · Apr 22, 2005, 03:14

Originally Posted by Matt Mickiewicz

As most of you know, over the past few weeks our server has come under increasing stress from the huge volume of visitors to these Forums and SitePoint. While we are working on a long-term solution, we've taken many, many measures to improve performance for vBulletin (including removing search functionality for non-logged in users) but none of them have been sufficient to eliminate lag time during peak periods.

As such, we've decided to remove signatures for non-logged on members, which has actually reduced server load for us by a couple percentage points for us. So, while I understand that this is an inconvinience, logged in members will continue to be able to view your signatures, visit your Websites, check out the work you've done, ad placements you've used, scripts you've implemented, etc. etc. etc.

This was a tough decision for us, and one we didn't take very lightly, but given the choice between limiting the number of Forum visitors at any one time and removing signatures, we decided that this would cause the least inconvinience.

Gah. vBulletin could really use some better competition. Somethingawful.com's forums, which handles a load comparable to Sitepoint (possibly larger), and they've been forced to make a lot of customizations to it to support the strain put on the server. For quite a while, this was displayed at the bottom of each page:

... it was later changed to...

vBulletin threatened to sue me if I did not put this here:
vBulletin - Copyright ©2000-2005, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd
HEY JELSOFT, WHY DON'T YOU SPEND YOUR TIME WRITING NON-CRAPPY FORUM SOFTWARE INSTEAD OF SUING YOUR CUSTOMERS?

**vgarcia** · Apr 22, 2005, 05:02

^^ I seem to remember that Wayne did a lot of forum hacking as well when SP was on vb 2.x.

**tntcheats** · Apr 22, 2005, 10:07

Originally Posted by M. Johansson

Gah. vBulletin could really use some better competition. Somethingawful.com's forums, which handles a load comparable to Sitepoint (possibly larger), and they've been forced to make a lot of customizations to it to support the strain put on the server. For quite a while, this was displayed at the bottom of each page:

... it was later changed to...

Hahaha those are great. Did more work than they did

**Dean C** · Apr 22, 2005, 10:34

There are always optimizations you can make - hopefully the next vB will be more easier on server loads

**Christoph** · Apr 23, 2005, 19:07

Why not charge for signatures and leave them to those who pay for it? With the money you could replace underlying hardware or add more horsepower?! That would help everyone who wants the signature as well as it would help Sitepoint.

But - I do not know what the hardware in use is and therefore my suggestion might not be fully qualified.

Christoph

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