Putting a link in one's signature

I have found recently that if i put a link to my MySpace page in my signature, it will remain there for a while and then mysteriously disappear later. Does this site go through everyone's signature periodically and remove links? Why?

Notice that the "link" now in my signature is not a hyperlink you can click on, you must cut and paste it. What I'm wondering is why I can't have a link like this:

Derek Andrews on MySpace

in my signature?

Does this site go through everyone's signature periodically and remove links?

It does, actually. chopin wants it this way because any search engine bots that visit the board will likely follow clickable hyperlinks in members' signatures to external sites as well as continue to index the board itself. This amounts to using YC's resources as a means of helping other sites (which we may compete with) get more indexed pages or an increased pagerank. Thus, I wrote a small script which runs every minute and removes the HTML in signatures which allows for hyperlinks (i.e. x becomes simply x).

You'll find information on this policy in the board rules under "Links in signatures".

What about the youngcomposers profiles page? I'm still able to put hyperlinks there.

wait...nevermind. you have to be logged in to view those anyway. are bots able to register on this site? I forget if you have one of those little "scrambled group of letters" generators to prevent bots from signing up.

putting a link in one's signature more like having a signature more like do I really need to have a boring quote and a link 20 times in one thread