I don’t even think I’ve ever had a sig here. (I have them turned off, so just tell me if I’m wrong and I display something obnoxious with every post.) Some of the many things I love about this board are that you can hide sigs and we don’t have avatars or picture posting. Those are the things that make message boards shiny. I like shiny things, but not shiny message boards. One board I go on is mostly made up of teenage girls, and they are so attached to their banner-heavy sigs and animated avatars that it’s really starting to irritate me. They’re way better than the average teenage girl, but still attached to their shiny.
When you meet someone in real life, you categorize them by physical appearance. When you talk with people on the phone, you at least have their tone of voice. I think sig lines perform a similar function on a message board, where there’s no physical appearnace and everyone’s text looks the same. You get dropped into this world with hundreds of people running around, and sig lines help you to sort out their identities. I remember a lot of folks by the sig lines they had, even though in some cases I haven’t seen the actual signatures in years, such as MEBuckner: ah, yes, the guy with the battle-axe.
avatars are pretty lame, IMO, but I’ve always liked sigs. Seems like there’s enough folks here that you kind of see something new most days.
That said, I never include mine. Not even sure what it is. Until now. . .
I kinda like avatars, but that’s just because I use my same one everywhere. I view them as an icon representing the person… it makes it easier to scroll through a thread looking for posts by a specific person rather than trying to read usernames as they fly up the screen.
Signatures, OTOH, yeah. Three lines, 250 Characters, maximum. No graphics.
Under no circumstances should your posts consistently be shorter than your .sig.
I like sig lines as long as they’re short and interesting in one way or another. I’m also definitely with most of the others here when I say the absence of images is one of the things I like very best about this board, right after The People and The High Level Of Discussion on the List of Cool Things That Make Me Keep Coming Back.
Now joining up with everyone else here in clicking my sig box to see what it actually says…
:smack:
Oh, rest assured, CalMeacham, I always react to them, just not on the boards. I’ll be scrolling through a thread, not really paying attention to the names, but then I’ll see a witty and new sig line, and say to myself "Hey, is that Cal?
Where do you get those things, anyway? I’m particularly fond of two of your older ones: “Tell Zeno I’m willing to meet him halfway”, and “‘Of course’, said my grandfather as he stepped from the time machine and drew his gun, ‘there’s no paradox if I shoot you.’”.
Myself, I’m boring. I’ve only ever had two siglines, the current Shakespeare one and an older Einstein quote.
The only time I tried attaching mine it didn’t show up.
Let’s see if it works better now:
hi.
Sage Rat: when you get the full posting screen, there are two sets of buttons. In each set, there’s one button that says “Submit Reply” and one that says “Preview Post”. To post your sig, you need to both check the “Show your signature” box and click on the lower of the two “Submit Reply” buttons.
I keep on forgetting to attach mine, but for the record, here it is:
Not entirely a thing of the past.
I almost never think to check the stoopid box. And when I do, I forget that it goes away on preview.
So I pretty much gave up and stopped caring.
I don’t think I’ve read anything but the sigs in this thread.
I meant across the entire internet, not just the SDMB.
oh. i had assumed that other board software would come with the same options too… :o
Not always. And I don’t want to have to register just to turn off some options.
I’m not saying that I get bent out of shape over it, but ideally, the world would be sig and avatar free.
I was wondering why my sig never showed up. Check the box… riiight
I checked it! I swear!
I used to have a few obscure pop culture references (“Buy Whizzo Butter” was one of them) but eventually I changed it to something more useful, my myspace, which nowadays pretty much doubles as my webpage.