Remove Signature links?

You find many ways to stop spam and spammers will find x2 ways to increase it. Yes That's a good suggestion for decreasing it but spam here at the off topic forum cannot be stopped .

Many forum sites use that idea and it may be effective at first but people will always find ways and will get what they want. I don't think removing signature links can stop the spamming problem. Spam will always be there but what the admins do are very effective in controlling spammers.

We have to pay in order to become members. I think this is a great mechanism of keeping spammers away

All the more reason to force at least a $1 fee for new member registration. They'll get tired of spending $1 every time they get banned for spamming new accounts, at the very least it would curb automated spam.

Automated spam is relatively easier to detect and prevent. But it is harder to detect when people join just for promoting stuff with tactics like posting 'thank you', 'well done', 'very nice' with a sig link at the bottom. Sometime they would repost a very basic question that has been done to death - pretending to be genuine participants. This trend was prevalent on DP forums 5 years ago - nobody checked it at that time and the community went downhill fast.

@Paul Myers - That is why deterrents such as minimum number of posts for posting links or stiff fee for registration could be a good idea.

What is their thinking behind making those clearly automated usernames?! I spot the bot created usernames before I actually see the spam messages. I would put money on it too that someone somewhere paid for them to do that. I wonder how much? I wonder if they know that their "SEO Services" they paid for consist of spamming the Warrior Forum.

The paid membership is cool because it separates the riff raff. If you're going to spend money to be on here, then clearly you plan to engage in appropriate forum behavior and communicate with other members, make helpful posts ETC. Every time I see one of those "one liners" (you know what I am talking about) it is almost always a non-paid member. 99% of the time when I see people promoting their product "nonchalantly" or so they think it is, it is almost always a non-paid member. I don't think the signatures are the problem, I think it's the links in the signatures. It probably really helped when there were not allowed to be affiliate links in your signatures. If there is a way to copy paste the OP's posts into Google and see if there are multiple exact matches, that person should get penalized. Too many times I see people "trying" to make "helpful" posts, but just end up copy pasting entire articles and adding, "Hope this helps" in the beginning. IDK about any of you but when I see that sh%t, it insults my intelligence. Do you really think that a forum that has been around since the late 90's, is centered around IM, SEO, and CONTENT, would be blind to someone just copy pasting other peoples content on here??

High Five if you ever copy pasted someones post from WF into Google to expose them!

I think that for how big this forum is and how much traffic it gets, everyone is doing a pretty damn good job keeping it on topic and not overly spammed. Usually if I see a spam post, I click on the red triangle, and it leads me to an invalid thread page, meaning someone is already on it! I am confident this forum is doing fine as far as finding spammers, but spammers will always find loopholes. There was that one day a couple of weeks ago where WF got hit pretty hard, and all of that "damage" was wiped out within 24 hours.

Something like minimum posts plus a waiting period of 30 - 50 days might work. If one wants to post link before that - let him/her pay for it. Most spammers will give up by then, imo.

Yes a few determined enough will still get past but the idea is to reduce the quantity of such entities.

Okay. I'am not aware of this stuff but most of the spammers are promoting websites in their spam threads and sig files. So isn't there any way to track those websites and then getting the administrative information via whois or something then pulling out the person behind him. Reporting him and showing what he has done? I'am pretty sure the automated accounts are promoting the same website so can't we just cut the tree before he get the peoples to hang up there?

And sorry for my english. I'am a jigglypuff.