Crue - it was due to spammers. Unfortunately, people came in and started putting spam links in signatures, bypassing our usual link restrictions. To keep our boards spam free, so ya'll can focus on weight loss and not digging through weird links in different languages, we had to put the restriction in.
I prefer to think of it as a badge of honor...you stick around here and participate, and you earn a big shiny ticker that shows up on all of your posts