As I imagine you’ve noticed, when you change your signature or profile picture it changes, even on old posts (where you’d posted with the old signature).
Anyone know, er…Gilby, do you know: can you let old posts keep their old sig-lines and such?
Your sig and avatar is just a field in the data record that is your user profile. The forum software just calls that field and inserts it into the threads dynamically. This is way more efficient than storing each sig and avatar in each post. It also allows for things like people being able to turn off sigs and avatars because they are fields in a database rather than hardcoded into the pages. There may be a hack to have it store the sigs in each post, but I’ve never seen any vbulletin board do it that way, or any other php/mysql forum software for that matter.
Older cgi based forum software creates html files for each thread, so sigs and avatars stick as they were when it was posted. But on a busy board, the files will accumulate and use huge amounts of diskspace. I’ve converted boards from the cgi to php/mysql and had the disk space requirememnt drop to 25% of what it was. From 25meg to 6meg. Thats a huge savings.
Oops… my geek is showing… simple answer… no, it’s just the way the software works. 
Thnax.
You can always search through here - http://groups.google.com.au/group/rec.sport.unicycling?hl=en . I think it does it the other way where it saves the signature as it was at the time of the post.
Andrew
Or, if it really matters in future, paste the signature into the body of the post.
Or keep a Word document on your own computer with all your signatures on, and occasionally give one a run out for old time’s sake!
The solution would be to store the sig in a table with a timestamp, then pull up the sig that was used at the time the post was made.
While space may matter to some, disk space is cheap and irrelevant in my opinion. It costs more to send the data to the end users than it does to store it. What really matters is performance. Using static files is better performing in most cases because it can be cached and doesn’t have as much computations to do, but since the forums allow one to configure it on a user by user basis, you have to have it be dynamic.
Static files would seem to be faster, but cgi based boards like UBB can bring a server to it’s knees faster. Some of my hosts have even banned UBB and cgi message boards from their servers.
Not to mention vbulletin just KILLS them when it comes to features and flexibility 
That has to do with how it is programmed.