I disabled signatures on the forum as they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. Some people were posting potentially controversial things and others were using them as large ads. The downsides of these seemed to outweigh any positive uses. It was easier to make the change globally then try to negotiate with individuals.
Sorry for that.
Looks like it's disabled in the user control panel, but not turned off for posts that already had signatures, or if a user already has a signature. Mine, for example, is still there.
Another case for redoing the whole forum installation, I think. phpBB3 is pretty decent these days.
Hmm. I'll have to look into that. Thanks for pointing it out.
Yes, YaBB sucks. On the other hand, as I've said in the past, I don't want to break the existing forum URLs. If there's a good way to maintain them while moving to another platform, it would be great.
I agree, disabling the sigs was a good idea, even though I liked mine. 
The new version of YaBB should install to its own directory (the current one is in /cgi-bin/yabb2) You should be able to just install the new version or a different package and start using it. Then set up some 301 redirects from some of the key pages in the old version to the new version's pages.
I do this stuff for a living, so if you would like any assistance, I can help.
It should be possible to move to a completely different board software. For example, you could import the Arduino forum into SMF. Someone figured out that the import script creates a temporary list of old YaBB topics and their corresponding new SMF topics. They modified the import script to not delete that information after the import, and then made a redirect script so that anyone clicking on an old YaBB link would be flipped over to the correct SMF link. That's pretty old but the concept should hold true.
It's not going to be totally automatic, but moving to better software would make the community a lot more useful. Even getting this YaBB installation configured correctly would be great.
Bringing an expert, like koyaanisqatsi, into this would be a great idea.
You don't necessarily need that. But if you implement it, the better for us.
As SMF would reside in a completely new folder ( not in ../www/cgi-bin/, but e.g. ../www/vhosts/.../htdocs/forum/ ), you can install SMF in parallel, import the yabb data (the converter works just fine) and all is good (well 95% or so).
As the converter doesn't touch links in the posts, you just keep the old yabb install as it is right now and all the links will still work.
Then you could do some referrer checks in .htaccess to make sure that incoming traffic that tries to get to the old forum directly is forwarded to SMF (via the database lookups or maybe not), and to get to linked posts traffic originating from SMF back to the old forum would not be redirected.
I'll donate 50$ if this gets done before Xmas.
Can't we simply keep this forum as a library? Lock it down, and use it for references, while actually conversing on a brand new, shiny phpBB3, which, in my opinion, is a much better choice than YaBB.
rite thing done .....................