Thread: No sig lines means no sig lines

Hey guys, we disabled sig lines because we don't want sig lines in the forum.
This also means that you should not put your sig line IN your forum post as text.
Some people have started doing this, but that is not what we want. We don't want sig lines in the forum at all. Not as a dedicated sig line, and not as part of the post.

Just to be clear, can we add something like "best regards, Paul" or similar like we would sign an email? Thanks

Originally Posted by richmondesi

Just to be clear, can we add something like "best regards, Paul" or similar like we would sign an email? Thanks

I hope so! That ought to be part of the friendly nature of the place, IMO.

Yours eternally,

(signature omitted)

I can understand why the administration would prefer people not have large graphics in their sigs. It consumes a surprising amount of server resources that someone has to pay for. It also helps prevent a subtle form of spam. I would have expected that sort of thing could be disabled in the forum software for that reason.
I don't understand why a single line of text is off the table, however.

I cannot fathom why this would be an issue. Would someone care to explain?

I wasn't being sarcastic. I just wanted to make sure it was ok. I'm all for the no signature line policy, but I am in the habit of signing my posts. If that's no longer cool, I'm fine never doing it again.

I'm glad somebody asked the question! I'm not against signature lines, per se. Actually I don't mind some of the clever witticisms (some are frankly dumb...you know who you are!)

I see the reason behind removing the marketing aspect from sig lines. To that end, I also see how it's easier to slash and burn the signatures entirely without prejudice rather than going through them one by one.

Now it seems that people are cloaking their sig lines into their text. I haven't seen this myself, but it sounds sneaky and clever and I can appreciate that ingenuity.

Isn't this becoming just another thing to police? I don't really see a simple solution.

Rules for some are just another excuse to get away with something...

Originally Posted by Jimbo7

I hope so! That ought to be part of the friendly nature of the place, IMO.

Yours eternally,

(signature omitted)

Yeah, but otoh, the way you've shown here, you have a 1 line post with a 4 line sig (including the empty lines).
And that's the clutter we wanted to get rid of.

Anyway, for now please don't do this.
I am discussing this with the other staff. If we would switch back to a 1 line sig in which you could put your name, and turn sigs back on, there would be double signatures (the one in the post and the one in the actual sig line).

We'd have to see what we do here. Even if we don't allow sig lines back, there might be other options to explore.

Ok, I'm a little confused here.
What you're describing is perfectly normal behaviour on many many forums and in fact to be expected particularly from older gentlemen who still tend to follow normal conventions for letter writing. In other words, that's not "clutter" it's readable text formatting done in an old school manner on a forum dealing with old school technology and techniques.
When you run through searches of (not on) a lot of other forums they come up in a condensed format because they have be processed to look like that for caching by the search engine companies who store hundreds of exabytes of data if not more.
This is a community, not a bulletiin board or email discussion group. If the board is struggling with storage issues then perhaps the community could help cover the costs of expanding server capacity, but just putting the clamps on people without telling them why is a little harsh.