I've got a little challenge here. The webmaster of a competitive site has begun to post a number of responses in my forums with a link to his web site. They are simple, 1-2 sentence responses that contain 2 links in their signature. I do have a rules requirement that we generally enforce about a minimum number of posts but, depending upon the signature, we can choose to waive it if it isn't competitive, e.g. a professionals forum, a person can put a short link about his/her web site. It's a little different when someone else has a competing forum and is putting his ad material in your front yard. How do you guys handle such things generally? Curious to hear.
i disabled links in signatures and the users can only have the links in their profiles or post it in a special board created to show off their sites. and if someone really bugs me, i ban them, if they are not even posting good things and just posting to promote their stuff, bye bye, don't have anything interesting to give there.
Live with it. I think he strengthen your forum with his posts if he don't invite people "come to my forum" with each message. I would think to make the friendship with him, not to ban him.
I haven't banned him yet but, like Zapita, I've disabled HTML links generally and am reserving it for users who have provided a certain number of posts. Part of the problem is that one of my boards is not one where you have numerous repeat visitors. People have a problem, they look, post a question if they can't find an answer, get their answer and come back if and when they have another problem. Unless the posts are substantial they end up being a useless advertisement, e.g. "yes, that's an interesting problem and maybe you want to handle it amicably. What more can you tell us?" followed by "Go to XYZ Boards where you can get free answers to the same questions you were looking for here.
Well, this is a problem. I have other users who are loyal and they earn their signatures. I think I need to install a script to limit signatures until they "earn" them like here. I just don't know if I want to engage in a pissing contest in each other's front yard. I can also put up short, semi-informative posts without putting my domain name in the actual signature but hiding it in the URL. I wonder whether you can use .htaccess to limit a link outside of a session in a web browser. Now THAT would be cool.
If you're using vbulletin, there is a hack available at www.vbulletin.org that allows you to specify the number of posts someone has to make before they are allowed to post links.
Thanks - I couldn't find it initially for some reason. It will come especially useful in this instance. I have been innovative and thought up a couple of other ways to handle the problem, some of it very funny and should be quite effective.