martinibuster - 9:28 am on Sep 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

...users who sign up just to drop their link into a forum thread are not quality posters. It reads like spam and only takes a few minutes to be reported as spam by members if the mods don't cache it first.

That's true. Any forum worth participating in is going to have a moderation team ready to remove posts that are merely pretexts for dropping a link. The only forums left are the ones not worth dropping a link at.

RE the scenario you mentioned, a Googler said at an SES conference in San Jose, about 2004, that Google didn't pass all the PageRank from irrelevant links.

Taking into account that forum mods will remove the link and that Google will discount any remaining links from posts that every day are further and further away from the main page on forums that aren't worth droping a link on to begin with, it becomes apparent that dropping links on forums may not be the best solution for a client.

It may be a viable solution for someone who intends to be a quality member in the long run, with hundreds or thousands of posts, it is not really a solution for someone who is tasked with obtaining links for a client.