MichaelBluejay - 9:22 am on Dec 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

Well... Indeed there is one non-spam forum posting benefit. It's using a signature.

Signatures are *quintessential* spam: Offering no real value to the other members, and done only to benefit the spammer (poster). It's exceptionally tacky. Besides being self-promotion at its most blatant, it also wastes valuable space, and for no good reason (to other forum users).

That's why I don't allow sigs in the forum I manage -- they add no value to the forum. Some users insist on violating the no sigs policy by *manually* typing in a signature. It's just sad. Of course I remove the sigs and if the user persists they get banned.

As soon as people stop thinking, "What can *I* get out of this personally, everyone else be damned?", the better.