vBulletin: Enable Signature after Certain Number of Posts or Days of Registration

vBulletin allows all newly registered users to create and edit signatures by default, which potentially increases the spam in user registrations. Someone would just sign up and put a few spamming backlinks in the signature and leave, without contributing a little bit to the community, probably writing 1 or 2 spamming posts as well. Therefore, allowing signature / signature links does no good to the forum.

To prevent this from happening and encourage users to actively engage in the community, a good approach is to open or enable signature only to those who have had certain amount of posts, say 20; or have passed a certain length of time after registration, say 10 days.

Step 1: Disable signature for “Registered Users”

Go to the AdminCP of your vBulletin, follow the left menu: Usergroups => Usergroup Manager => Edit “Registered Users” by clicking the corresponding “Go” => In the “Signature Permissions” section, select “No” for “Can Use Signatures”. Now all newly registered users will have no signature privileges at all by default.

Step 2: Add a new Usergroup “Acknowledged Users” with signature capabilities

Create a new Usergroup by: Usergroups => Add New Usergroup => Select “Registered Users” for “Create Usergroup Based off of Usergroup” and click “Go” => Name this Usergroup, eg. “Acknowledged Users” => In the “Signature Permissions” section, select “Yes” for “Can Use Signatures”.

Step 3: Set to automatically promote users with over 20 posts from “R” group to “A” group

Now that you have 2 Usergroups with different signature permissions, the last step is to add a promotion strategy that recognizes all users that have 20 posts or more and promotes them from “Registered Users” to “Acknowledged Users”: Usergroups => Promotions => “Add New Promotion” => Select “Registered Users” for “Usergroup”, specify “10” for “Days Registered”, specify “20” for “Posts”, select “Posts” for “Promotion Strategy” and select “Acknowledged Users” for “Move User to Usergroup” => Click “Save”.

Done. Now vBulletin will automatically promote users that have greater than or equal to 20 posts to a new Usergroup that has signature enabled. Other than promoting by posts, you can also promoting users to a privileged group by reputation.

 

=== Notes ===

In Step 3, you can optionally select “Additional Usergroups” for Promotion Type to add an extra group-ship of the superior group to the user rather than exclusively promoting him to it (so that the Acknowledged Users becomes his only group and he’s not a member of the Registered Users any more).

What happens to users with multiple Usergroups on contradictory permissions?

If a user is assigned to multiple Usergroups, ‘Yes‘ permissions always override ‘No‘ permissions unless one of the groups is a Banned group. In that case, permissions of the Banned group rule – ‘No‘ permissions take precedence.

5 thoughts on “vBulletin: Enable Signature after Certain Number of Posts or Days of Registration”

  1. In step 2, mine doesn’t give the option to select “registered users” for “Create Usergroup Based off of Usergroup”

    Any ideas?

  2. Great help and great relax I got from your post. I heartily thank you for this wonderful tips.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top