Do you look at signatures?

Do you actually look at them? Or do you ignore them? Do you go so far as to disable them?

I wonder how many people want nothing to do with others' signatures.

 

What do you think I'd do? ;D Of course I look at them, signatures specially with images can say a lot about the people on the forums.

 

I turn off sigs and avatars on almost every forum I go on including ours lol it makes the pages load much faster it seems plus theres no distraction, if I dont turn avatars off in the usercp I use adblock on them

 

I look at them, and on my own forums I check out the link to make sure it's not something terrible my users would get offended about. On other people's forums I don't usually visit the links.

 

I'm the same way.

 

i like signatures. it often says much about the poster and gives me a better idea with who im talking with.
i disabled every graphic things in my forums signatures, because it is more annoying than informative. But text-only is enough information you need about a person

 

I pretty much ignore signatures. Unless they have this really huge image that takes up 1/2 the page, then I just leave the forum and dont bother going back.

 

I tend to look at them, yes. I've seen some pretty creative signatures over the years, many of which have caused me to giggle or grin.

 

I read sigs and visit the site if it looks like something I might be interested in. I've never disabled them, I might miss out on something good

 

I will often visit a signature link if there's mention of a contest... that's how I landed here

 

... and look at how well it ended up working - one of our community's most active (and respected) members!

 

On the site i visit i prefer the avatars and signatures on because i shows the difference of people through more than words and if they made it it shows a more artistic side of that person and its always fun to look at an image after 10 or so pages of pure writing even if you have seen it ten times over it just makes the forum a little easier to read in my opinion and more fun.

 

I look at them, they're disabled by default on one of my communities though, just gives a much cleaner look and feel.

 

I look at them, and if a link catches my eye, I click it.

 

What types of links catch your eyes the most? Do colors and boldness attract your attention? Or does that markup make the text easier to ignore (just like banner advertisements)?

 

Maybe you could run some A/B tests with different markup of the same link text.

 

if it's an image I tend to skip over it (much like ad blindness)

if the anchor text interests me I'll check it out

 

To be honest NO - I hate people who pump their signatures full of links, especially if they are post hogs and their names are popping up everywhere

 

True, but what if a signature is composed of a single attractive banner (non-obtrusive)? Would it possibly interest you?

 

My signatures have always been ONE banner ;D made by me of course.