Sig link repeatedly missing

After replacing the link to my Soundclick page in my signature last night, it immediately worked from posts I'd made... and today I notice the link is missing again. Mods, is this something you did, or some improbable bug in the forum? If it's something you did, why was I not told?

I have replaced the link in my signature again. If you had removed it before and you wish to remove it again, please send me a PM explaining why.

I think you're not supposed to place external links in your sig.

Mine did that as well. I guessed, being new here, the mods don't like external links in the signatures on this forum. (I say new, I'm not really new to YC at all as I was a regular here six or seven years ago)

But since you've only flagged this problem up today, and have over 1000 posts, I'm more inclined to think it's a bug.

No bug...

Behold!

All external links (i.e. links to sites other than www.youngcomposers.com[/url']) in members' signatures are removed without notice on a regular basis by an automated script. Plaintext links are allowed, however...

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/faq.php?faq=board_rules#faq_links_in_signatures

I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but for the time being, we're not allowed ...

Seriously? I think I've found a bug in the system then since I've had my soundclick link up since the very first day I created an account on here. Oh crap, I'm probably going to lose it now...

Seriously? I think I've found a bug in the system then since I've had my soundclick link up since the very first day I created an account on here. Oh crap, I'm probably going to lose it now...

Well...it's not there right now. ;)

Seriously? I think I've found a bug in the system then since I've had my soundclick link up since the very first day I created an account on here. Oh crap, I'm probably going to lose it now...

"Plaintext links are allowed, however..." ;)

spam reasons maybe?

not that it isn't annoying, but then again clicking on the member name, you can go to teh members website, which is pretty much the same.

If it's something you did, why was I not told?

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Anyway, yeah. Robin got it right.

It is my understanding that allowing links to external sites carries the potential of undermining YC's pagerank. In other words, it's just a measure to optimize our search engine favourability. I admit it can be slightly irritating, but if you leave the full URL in there, people can always copy and paste it.

If you check out the page footer, you'll see there's a link to crawlability.com in the vBSEO copyright line (this is the software which provides us the friendly forum URLs ending in .html). For the same reason as outlined above, it's not really ideal to have this here, but we're obliged to maintain it for copyright reasons, so there's not really any scope for negotiation. ;)

I'm certain we went over this exact issue before. Is poor memory your cause for bringing it up again?

It is my understanding that allowing links to external sites carries the potential of undermining YC's pagerank. In other words, it's just a measure to optimize our search engine favourability.

I'm certain we went over this exact issue before. Is poor memory your cause for bringing it up again?

Not possible. I've never had any link in my sig except my YC profile, until now. :P You must be thinking of someone else. Anyway, thanks for the heads-up. I'm not big on signatures, so it's not surprising I've been here for years without knowing about this policy.

So isn't also bad that we are including external links in our Wiki articles and pages, or am I missing something here?

Hmm, touch

The wiki article outbound links are relevent to the article, or give proper credit, which makes them appropriate and on topic. External links in a signature from users are not on topic, and these links are consistently repeated throughout the forum which reduces our search engine relevance. On the wiki, it is a one shot deal, external links reside on one page, and are not consistently repeated throughout the wiki.

So I still stand by not having external links in a signature, for these reasons. If you want to direct us towards another part of the web, including the links within the thread (not signature) is sufficient enough, and as mentioned, plain text links also work. Perhaps if we grow enough to the point where search engine rankings are not as important as they used to be for us, we could change this rule, but for now, we are too small, and we do rely on much of our traffic from Google and Yahoo.

And of course we want YC to keep growing, don't we chaps? :D Then when we take over the world someday, you'll all be up for positions of prestige, having gotten in on the ground floor!

I get dibs on the consulship of Paris. And Seattle.