It's been a long time coming, but personal signatures are finally separated from content on the site. Now, when you create a comment, your signature will not appear in the box. It will appear below your comment once posted, though. And, when you update your signature, it will update across all your comments.
The signatures are also displayed in a smaller italicized font to make it more clear that it isn't part of the comment itself, making it easier to follow along a discussion. This also makes any lines of characters people add to signatures to separate them redundant.
There will be some growing pains in relation to this as all the older posts have signatures included in the actual content of the post. This is an annoying holdover from the way Druapl (our CMS) handles sigs. But it will make things easier for us going forward. It will even improve the way searches work on the site (since right now it's also indexing your signature in every comment you make).
I've also added in a homepage link next to your username when you post a comment. This is pulled from your profile. You can enter a personal homepage or blog address and it will automatically appear with all comments you make site-wide. All of these links are using rel="NOFOLLOW" to keep people from using them to improve search engine rankings, too, making us a less attractive spammer/SEO target.
PLEASE UPDATE YOUR SIGNATURE AND RECENT POSTS
As a result of these updates, the signature guidelines have changed. Lines of characters to separate your signature from your posts aren't necessary and should be removed. Also, as the homepage link is now a part of all comments, the homepage link within the signature is redundant and should be removed. Please be sure to update your signature appropriately.
Also, it would be a GREAT help to us if you could go through the last two pages of recent posts and manually remove your signature from any posts that haven't been replied to yet (once someone replies, you can't edit any longer). I'm going to ask the other mods to assist with this where comments have been replied to in recent posts so we can have our currently active threads looking better. Just the last two pages should be good. And if an older thread is resurrected, we'll fix it. This is now done. Mods will update older topics that are replied to. Please don't edit any more of your old posts.
Sorry it took so long to get to this point. I know we've talked about it back and forth here and there, but I finally got some time to work on it (actually, I needed a coding break and this seemed like a good way to do it, but that's another post).
Regards,
John
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