How about removing all the issues once and for all by being radical and just don't allow signatures if they upset people? Everyone can provide a URL link under their name (a little green globe) on the left. Why not say that if you want to link some where do it there. If you have more than one link you want to share you can set up a webpage with all your links in one place and give that pages as your one URL. There are plenty of free web hosting services out there with easy build pages.

An alternative and simple solution is to set up new user with the default setting of signatures turned off - it is then up to individuals if they want to view signatures?

i don't think we want to turn off signatures en masse, i think they add some nice flavor, and like tinjaw says, anyone who doesnt want to see any signatures can easily turn them all off.

this isn't a big deal, just something we might be able to improve a little with some suggested guidelines.

and you know we can't help tinkering with things here and discussing the "best" solution to any given problem

the other alternate solution that i think might be a nice little forum modification that let users enable and disable specific user's signatures in an easy way, with the ability to mark certain users signatures as disabled by default.  like just a little + or - button to the left of a signature that collapses it to 1 line hight, and the setting would be remembered forever, so once you collapse someones signature it will remain collapsed *for you* on every post they make until you expand it again, and vice versa.  i just don't know if that's not overkill.

I stand with f0dder, affiliate links make no sense and significantly reduces the quality of the forum, but i think that has been discussed in other threads and has been declared as banned. What intrigues me is why IQlover still uses that sign, showing an absolute disrespect for the rules of the forum.

As for links for other sites, please don't ban those, i like to visit other member's sites, and find some of them are very interesting!

i think you were kidding but in case you werent, i'll just say clearly that no we wouldn't do that, we want people to be able to link to their websites and interests.

mouser, you missed the winky at the end of my sentence.. anyway, we can leave the signature option on by default for new users and remind them that there is an option to turn it off.. also for users who unaware of the rules (nobody reads every line) and sport ten-foot high banners display inappropriate links in their sig, the mods can always send a gentle hint..

Finally i disabled showing the signatures of other users. The last straw was a signature with an animated image. In my opinion a signature should be an addon to a posting but never should detach the attraction from the content to the signature. The content of a posting is the important part and the signature should be small and unintrusive. It's a pity to disable the signatures because i liked many of them, especially when they contain links to interesting sites, but the current signature rules offer too much room for "abuse".