Writing up a signature on the Nature & Garden forum

A signature is a nice way to introduce yourself to other Nature & Garden community members. Here are a few tips on how it works on this forum.

Do’s and Don’ts of your signature

Some things should remain private: after all, this entire forum is public. This means anybody can access and view posts, replies, and pictures both in the forum and on your member profile page.

Do not add any of the following to your signature

• email details
• phone or address details
• birthday details
• any other private information that would make the work of scammers and hackers easy

Also, some things regularly trigger difficult discussions. Readers should want to grow luscious tomatoes, not throw rotten ones at each other!

Thus, do not state or include:

• your political affiliation or position
• advertising or spam links

Signatures are moderated, so if anything is out of line we’ll send you a message to work things out together.

Do consider adding some of these details

However, some things are nice and might lead to new local friendships and more relevant gardening help and advice:

• Country, state or largest nearby town or area (For example: Charleston, South Carolina)
• Gardening zone (For example: zone 7b)
• A link to your photo albums on your member profile

Fun ideas to add to your signature

Make your signature more lively, if you wish!

• Add your favorite garden quote
• Jot down a sentence that shares what you love about your garden or houseplants
• Use emoticons or add clowny images (animations are lost on gifs though)
• Heard a funny joke recently? Add it for other readers to laugh and smile!

Technical things about how the signature works

Your signature is always updated, even on past posts and replies. We don’t save or store past versions of your signature. Only the current one remains in the website database.

Erasing your signature

To erase your signature:

• click on the cogwheel to edit your account details
• select the “Signature” tab
• delete the text in the text box
• if there are only spaces or “enter/return” characters, the signature is considered empty
• click the “Save” button

If you erase it, it’ll disappear from all posts and replies you’ve ever written.

Links and spam

As per our terms of use, adding links that connect to merchant websites or other editorial sites isn’t allowed in your signature. Moderators will edit them out. In clear cases of spamming, you’ll be banned instantly.

Links are automatically given the “nofollow” property, meaning they won’t count towards SEO ranking by the various search engines.

Basic HTML editing is available for formatting. For example, you can use colors, bold, italics and strikethrough.

Signature length and character limitations

The maximum length of your signature is 1000 characters. These include emoticons which may count for several characters each. Adding colors to your fonts and such may also count towards this limit.