Signatures - why and why not

[stan423321]

Forum signatures. Before following wall of text, I'll sum my thoughts up - I personally don't like them, and there's a number of reasons for that. Yes, I have turned them off, I'm aware of this option. Still a friendly discussion will probably not hurt any of you.

I can't say I've done much research on forum signatures. Anyway I'm pretty much sure they have originated from the place they made much more sense. That's right, traditional mail! Signatures in traditional mail made sense because they were pretty much reassuring you who wrote the letter and what is attitude of that person to you. I won't even mention that some of these letters weren't written by authors (erm, I mean, servants did the ink work), so handwriting style didn't help much.

Where did however signatures really take of were the mailing lists. In case you do not know, mailing list is one of many predecessors of current internet forums; the another one is Usenet group, and they were usually configured to work together. Hold on, I think mailing list was more of forum mixed with RSS and... oh well, basically you sent an e-mail to the list's server and it forwarded it to everyone else subscribed, and optionally to one of the Usenet archives.

Mailing lists and Usenet groups are however more messy then modern messaging boards. For example, the thread as such does not exist there (although modern Usenet readers may try to sort data so it appears as a thread). Instead, messages are either new or replies to another messages. This mess made users kind of feeling responsible for quality of their "boards", so one-line posts were not that common.

Now you can see posts were long, and usually included quotes at the beginning. These days, our powerful computers have no problem with computing giant anti-aliased desktops, but then the poor users of text terminals needed every line of text. So, e-mail adress of the sender was shown at the beginning of the message, and then it scrolled out. You could forgot who wrote the message. If you even got the address like jvvvg^[email protected], then you could easily mess it up with jvvvg^[email protected]... wait, it could be actually the same person switching to different software. And who that person claims to be, anyway? A fan? Someone deeply connected to the topic? Moderator? Remeber, no post history there!

Signatures made a lot of sense in this context. They supplied the reader with necessary contact information. They told is writer a student, or a professor, or just someone else. They showed their interest in "board" subject. They reminded who did write the post.
Look at the side of this forum. What you see is basically equivalent of all that stuff. Username. Interests. Forum status. PM information. All in compact and unified form. Moreover you may easily search history of one's posts.

It's obviously true that signatures contained a lot of different stuff. ASCII art. Quotes. Announcements. Ads. However other things changed with the invention of modern message board, and inclusion of threads is quite notable. You don't need to quote one's posts so often anymore. So, your posts get shorter, as you assume reader may just scroll up. One-line posts are not such a problem anymore.

Or are they?

As posts get shorter, it becomes harder to recognise the author of the post. No handwriting here. Style may be board-standard. Therefore people asked for more recognition features. Some boards implemented avatars, and some included old-fashioned signatures. Because they didn't do harm before, they can't be a harm now... right? Wrong.

Shorter posts tend to be packed up into a single displayable page. This means that - supposing signatures are on the bottom of the post - posts get mixed with them. Mailing list message ended up with a signature, but you pretty much had to leave the post anyway when you ended up reading main body, so you could do that just after the signature or later. You can't have something like this with typical signatures. Moreover you don't end up your usual chatter with mentioning your name, degrees and stuff at the end. There are some IRC-like topics in which sigs really, really get out of place.

Anyway, the case of RPC itself is very... specific, as the board was modded so it uses avatars for very unusual reasons. Therefore a lot of users seem to use the sigs as some kind of crossing between an avatar and a site banner. However putting even a mere 6 lines of quotes, achievements and songs in your sig (or even less if there is an image already) puts me off. I want to read posts. If you want to write about yourself, there are other, less invasive ways to do so.

With exception of announcements which are designed to be obtrusive (see my almost current sig - it was blueish, and I believe you skipped it off unless you were to check it), I don't see much point in sigs nowadays - well, on modern boards. If you use mail, e-mail, mailing lists and such stuff, or you are writing outside your account, they still do their work. But finishing "I don't like cloudberries, too" with 750x200 image and bunch of unrelated quotes is beyond me. Right now.

[Serza5]

That's a cool story bro, but we're still going to use sigs here.

[stan423321]

Picture is not appropriate. I just do not see why do you use/view sigs, and "we will use them" response isn't something that sounds like an argument anyway.

Look, I kill people. Thyey feel bad? Cool, I'm going to kill them anyway.

[DesLife]

What the Foch

[Tobbe]

I see Serza beat me to it, but still...

[Serza5]

Picture is not appropriate. I just do not see why do you use/view sigs, and "we will use them" response isn't something that sounds like an argument anyway.

Look, I kill people. Thyey feel bad? Cool, I'm going to kill them anyway.

We use them because we want to be unique.

[Xenon]

I tend not to use signatures either, but I wouldn't say I hold any sort of dislike to them.

What the Foch

How is she?

[El Dango]

Sigs are for winners!

[DesLife]

What the Foch

How is she?

Fine, doing very well !

[Tobbe]

[PowerPatrick]

This thread is now about grill and barbecue.

[DesLife]

I've had a great BBQ this summer. Well, during winter I'll have raclettes instead.

[Tobbe]

I love BBQing! I especially love grilled pork chops with grilled corn and lots of butter and potato salad on the side. Mmmm.... Not to mention that it's by far the most manly form of cooking.

[stan423321]

Mmmm... pork chops... corn... potato salad... oranges... Wwwwait, why do you grill oranges? Ah, I see.

[spiraldoor]

I had a barbeque once, but I found the fire more interesting than the food.

[Haruka]

I can't remember the last time I had a barbecue.

[El Dango]

I have a barbecue almost every day when the weather is nice. Ribs and steak are favourite kinds of meat when it comes to grilling.

[PowerPatrick]

I have a barbecue almost every day when the weather is nice. Ribs and steak are favourite kinds of meat when it comes to grilling.

Yeah, it was really nice when I visited you. I should totally come again some time.

[El Dango]

Yeah, that would be great. Maybe some time next summer we could plan something.

[Adsolution]

Anyone seen this video? It's funny as sh*t: