I believe it's a part of the new url parser; myself for one i like it on my site, as I dont' want to be held responsible for those users who link to sites that don't fit in with our site (such as those with questionable content)

What the heck has "nofollow" has to with that?

nofollow helps google and google alikes on pageranks, that's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

nofollow on sigs imho could be okay, but no real need. In posts, nofollow should be abscent, as posting a link on many forums should increase the pagerank of that url.

In sigs, especially HERE, when those posting are obviously webmasters who I assume want their legit links known -- and ranked higher in search engines, while at the same time promoting UBB (who's denying that "Google Juice" (haha, love that term)) -- then nofollow needs to go...

But in general, nofollow needs to go for user-links because even if it was that 1/10000 (or whatever lol) chance that it is real spam, admins/mods could delete the post before Google (et al.) even notice.

But I DO agree with nofollow for links pointing to any pages that require user input (Reply/Quote/etc).

I don't use "no follow" on any of my sites and do not have a problem with ranking. As for user generated links - really the only time you need "no follow" is if you have a very large number of spam links that you leave up for a long time. In other words, if you ignore your forums.

There is discussion in SEO forums that if you "no follow" most or all of the links coming from your site - you are telling Google that you have no confidence in the content of your site and no control either - and this can result is a lower ranking from Google rather than the higher ranking webmasters are looking for.

Since not using "no follow" has never hurt me - that is the view I tend to agree with.

The most valuable use for "no follow" is for helping control duplicate content (and this is being used appropriately in UBB) which can ruin your rankings in Google more than almost anything else you can do to a website.

When a high page rank site links to another site it affects their rating; I don't want to allow this for tiny little crap sites which will be gone in two weeks; I like to encourage sites to sign an affiliation agreement before blindly sending them traffic (and thus vouching that I want to refer them)...

You'll actually find several sites online who will pay you for linking to them if your site has a PR of more than a 3... It's crazy how many people just go and spam sites which just allow any joe schmo to post links (and not nofollow)

Having an option to turn off "no follow" for certain groups would be an excellent option. Right now to control spam I am just not letting new users use the sig file and in certain forums not letting them use UBB or HTML. In my case, spam tends to come mainly from the pros - and that discourages them. Once a certain post count is met the probationary period is over and full membership privileges kick in - without the "no follow" in my case as I don't really have the problem of members having sites that disappear after a few weeks or real off-topic sites being posted.