Are Sitepoint signature links blocked from search engines?

[Clinton]

There is a lot of signature spam around in Sitepoint and mods have maintained that those signatures are of no use as SEs and those who are not logged in can't see the signatures.

But I found this 2 year old thread elsewhere. Matt says:

Originally Posted by Michael_Goldman
I remember now, I actually stopped posting because they put nofollow at signature links I don't care much about the links of course, but thats was just annoying and insulting!
AND

Originally Posted by GeorgeB.
I really left because SitePoint doesn't show your signature links to Search engines. So you get no SEO gain from posting over there and I can talk to all the same people here....

You'll be happy to know that this has been changed:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=477403

So did they change it again? Or are links dofollow and visible to SEs?

[tke71709]

They changed it back a few months ago.

Sitepoint signatures are not displayed to non-logged in users (e.g. search engines) so whether they are dofollow or not is irrelevant.

[JJMcClure]

Yeah, now we're working on making that more obvious to the link spammers. At the moment you can't even have a sig link until you've been a member for 90 days.

[petertdavis]

One of the last things I did as a moderator at Sitepoint was to mention to them that this task was like trying to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. The spammers don't even care if their sig links show or not. They have a quota of forum spam posts to do, and Sitepoint is on the list of forums to spam, and that's as far as their thought process goes. I totally agree that something needs to be done with it, the crap posts are making the forum totally unusable. The real problem is that the level of discussion is dropping and the moderators who were hoding the place together are leaving one by one. When Rudy left, he was doing something like half of all the moderating. Those shoes are going to be hard to fill. There are still some good, very active moderators left (and I hope Sitepoint is jumping through hoops to make sure to keep them!), and they're putting in the effort to cultivate new ones, so I do hope things will improve. I just don't think that what they're doing with signatures is going to make any difference at all. What will make a difference, one way or another, is if they can keep on the good moderators they have, and cultivate some more good ones.

[JJMcClure]

Hey Peter, what was your username on SP? I've been a member for a couple of years, I might know you?

I'm a mentor there at the moment and there's a lot of discussion going on about how to deal with the spam problem including making changed to the sign up procedure that makes it clear that spammers are wasting their time. It's not good right now but it's a long way from making the forum unusable, if you have any suggestions please fire away! Right now proposed remedies basically fall into two categories, a) Get harsh, b) Get encouraging.

[petertdavis]

Same username as here. I haven't been very active on there for a while. You can look up some of my old posts in the clubhouse, but you won't see the most interesting stuff until you make Advisor.