>Updating my original post --which I stand by--I just came across a message dated 4/24 and it was a bit misleading in that regard. The message had a paragraph pertaining to the subject in the thread. Immediately following that were two political links, but I could not tell they were political links and they did appear to be a part of the message because there was nothing else --no name--signature--nothing--in the signature area to show it was a part of the signature. The two links appeared to be a part of the message. I clicked on one thinking it was in support of his message, but found it to be a political link.
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>Now I still do not believe this should be banned. It is perfectly acceptable to have links in a message or in a signature block. What is difficult is knowing when it is a part of the message and when it is a part of the signature section. What would be helpful though would be a way to clearly tell when the signature section begins if the user has not entered any name in their signature, but only links. Otherwise, it does appear that the links are a part of the message and not the signature block. Frankly, the user may not even realize it.

The way the signature is being parsed right now is with a P tag, for paragraph, followed by an I tag, for italic and then a blue font. In this case, it was difficult to see it was a signature, other than the fact that it was italic, because the hyperlink overwrote the default blue font.

Signature was good at first but not much of any use now. The reason is that the signature is right on top of the message. If you take a look at this very own message, you see my picture, my name, a link to my profile, my company name, a link to my company and so on. Which is, for most of it, what many members are simply repeating in their signature.

Some members like to put citations in their signature. Or, some kind of a funny line. This reminds me of the way the Facebook status works. This is sometimes the content we find out there.

So, after all those years, the question is, is there really a need to put a signature into our own message. I do not have one. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the Universal Thread engine provides a very good signature at the top of the message. Some sites are offering the same, but for most of them, they do not have this fancy interface for the signature at the top of the message. So, basically, on most of those sites, we see a funny cartoon to represent the user (and I mention a user not a member - in here, I think we provide more respect to the members of the site by using that terminology). On those sites, we also see a lot allowing the persons to hide their identity and use some kind of a pseudo username coming from movies and so on. This does not impress me. I think we did a good job here in that area. So, for them, I can understand the use of a signature as there is pretty much nothing else in regards to a signature on the said related sites.

The situation mentioned here is an isolated one. In general, we do not have any problem with a signature. And, usually, when someone includes one, it is more like a signature and not a simple single link to an external Web site.

As I mentioned in private to someone else, I might revise a little bit the Terms & Conditions of the site about a little think in regards to the signature. But, in general, the use of a signature usually does not cause any problem.