Thread: No sig lines means no sig lines

Originally Posted by MickR

Actually Caledonian, you're mistaken. That 'right' was taken away according to the answers I recieved.

Indeed. Though I admit freely that we had not looked at the difference between valedictions and expression of opinion.
Some people started pasting their old sig line (with political / philosophical expression) at the bottom of their post. That is what triggered this thread. The rules we implemented: 'no sig lines' had the effect of banning both, whereas what we wanted to target was only one thing. One of the reasons we didn't see it was because not all of us (most of us IIRC) did not use valedictions. I know I didn't, or at least not in group based communication like forum posts.

During the course of this discussion here, we also argued the issue amongst ourselves.
Expression of e.g political opinion has no place in e.g. a honing discussion. There are other places here on the site where such things should go.
Otoh, valedictions are one form of good manners, and this being a gentlemen's site, that should not be punished.

Therefore we will have to amend the rules.
Some of you were using valedictions in the actual post, and have always been doing that. If you want to continue doing that, that's fine. Just keep it limited to that.
Some others kept their valediction in their sigline. Currently, all sig lines are still in the database so we can't just turn them on again. I'll ask the devs to clear all signatures from the database, and then reenable a limited sig line.