I never understood why signatures don't appear in Serious Discussion board. Like, is it because it attracts spam? By that reasoning, should signatures be disabled on the entire forum? Are the rest of the discussions not considered serious?
Its a good compromise and an alternative to banning signatures altogether.
I believe this trend is due to a couple of reasons. Nobody wants to hear about the first reason, so let's just talk about the second, which is signature campaigns have steadily diminished the quality of discussion on the forum for years. They encourage people to post for no reason other than to get paid, which leads to a lot of inconsequential jabber that quickly buries actual substance. Those casually visiting the forum have no motivation to wade through it for the occasionally interesting tidbits. Thus, a lot of former visitors have stopped coming here altogether.
You need to look it in the bigger picture, I can say if the forum disabling the signatures in every boards, it will be the end of this forum.
It's not surprising if there's an user become active in this forum because of signature campaign and they need to maintain their quality post to able stay in their campaign. This will encourage them to improve their quality post, increase the merit flow, increase the discussion, using feedback and flag correctly and trying to not break the forum rules. Because they're don't want to get red tagged, their account will become worthless.
Can you imagine if the forum ban the whole signatures? any user doesn't care anymore with appropriate use of feedback, flag and trust, they will trolling in this forum since they have nothing to lose. I wouldn't be surprised if many accounts will get red painted due to personal problem or something like that.
I don't see any problem if there's a user only have purpose to earn money in this forum, I believe they're came from poor country and they need to feed their family. At least this forum is an angel for them and it's good since this forum is really important for them.
This forum already offer a good feature, let me show it:
1. You don't want to see an user wear avatar and signature? click Profile - Look and Layout Preferences - Don't show users' avatars. and Don't show users' signatures.
2. You see an off topic and low quality post? report the post to the moderators.
3. The moderators didn't take any action with your report? click ignore on that's annoying user.