Change regarding signature hyperlinks policy

The policy of automatic removal of all hyperlinks on members' signatures has now been slightly altered: all external hyperlinks will be removed, but all internal hyperlinks will be left alone. External means linking to websites other than www.youngcomposers.com, internal means linking to any page on www.youngcomposers.com.

Please note that internal links must contain the www portion of the URL, otherwise they will be removed (e.g. linking to http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/ is OK, whereas linking to http://youngcomposers.com/forum/ is not and will result in removal of the link).

This thread has been created because the new system uses a different method to the previous one, which had proved its reliability over the many months it had been running. Thus, there may be some minor issues with the new system, although having tested it quite thoroughly I'm fairly confident it works fine. If you experience any strange goings on with your signature or notice any strange goings on with anyone else's signature, please report your findings here.

Just a quick question: why are external links not allowed?

I refer you to my post here, David:

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".

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I see. That makes sense.

I don't like signatures, so I disabled them in my profile! *grin*