The way the system is currently set up, sigs are automatically attached to every post you make, unless you deselect that option.
We’re considering doing it the other way around – if you want a sig in your post, you select that option for that post.
Discussion?
your humble TubaDiva
Adminstrator
I’d prefer if sigs were NOT automatic. I like having a sig, but I don’t want to use it all the time.
[ul]
[li]since signatures change on all your posts, I would guess that your current signature is stored in a database, which means extra work every time a thread is viewed.[/li][li]If a person wants to show their signature, once in a thread should be sufficient.[/li][li]IMHO, signatures make threads harder to read, especially in threads with short posts and long signatures.[/li][/ul]
I like it this way. IIRC the previous software required that you select each time to send a sig…it was a pain.
I just wish posts kept their original sig line, so that I wouldn’t lose those quotes when I forget to copy them the first time.
But then I like many sig lines & don’t mind skipping over them. OK, sometimes they can get a little long…
So sue me!
God, yes!!! And thank you for soliciting opinions on the subject.
Make it really, REALLY hard to add the sig! Like, the poster has to lift his monitor up to his shoulders and do a Texas two-step for the sig to appear.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post on the “God Damn Sigs Are Too Long” thread.
While I enjoy being able to have a sig line, and I usually enjoy reading other people’s sigs, they are not, to me, a really important feature of the board. If the board will operate better without them, I’m fine with either making it harder to add them, or doing away with them entirely.
However, I’d like to suggest a compromise - which may or may not be practical, as I don’t know anything about how all of this stuff works. Could you simply limit sig lines to a certain number of characters? Choose, say, a two-line limit, and set the sig line field to accept only the number of characters that would fill two lines. This would eliminate long, cumbersome sigs but still allow short, snappy ones.
Personally, I always thought that good sig lines were supposed to be short and to the point. Who said ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’?
William Shakespeare, in “Hamlet”.
Ahhh, Shakespeare just WROTE it.
Polonius SAID it.
Nah.
Bacon wrote it, Shakespeare claimed it, Polonius said it.
Mmmm, bacon.
You probably already know, or have assumed this, but I’d like to see a poster have to take a positive action to display a sig, rather than the automatic setting we currently have.
A side effect of this might be a small increase in response time as the server won’t have to search for a sig unless the poster absolutely wants is displayed. I wonder how many of them are appended merely because a poster forget to uncheck the box.
Uh oh…
Put me down for “No Sigs”. Reading someone’s sig the first 100 times was okay, but after that it gets a little bit annoying.
MHO: it wasn’t that big a deal, under UBB, to have to remember to click on “show sig” every time you posted. And it was nice to know that you didn’t HAVE to include your sig if you didn’t want to. The way it is now, you’re pretty much stuck with either “sig all the time” or “no sig all the time”. Whenever you change your profile, it goes through and updates all your posts, which means you can’t play games with your sig line anymore. I used to enjoy seeing people fool around with them.
But it isn’t that big a deal to have it be automatic, either. Actually, it was rather nice NOT to have to remember to click on the box. But then, I’m not much for fooling around with my sig.
But either way is fine with me. Probably “not automatic” is better, on balance. More latitude. Although, if it would speed up the boards, I would gladly forgo the pleasures of the sig line.
I liked it better when the software didn’t change your sigs in all your old posts. As 2DuckG said, you got to see people playing with their sigs - more fun.
[geezer]Why, I remember the day Sealemon bolded the word “BAD” in his sig - land sakes, the talk that started[/geezer]
Count this as one vote against auto-sigs.
Yup.
“This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.”
Hamlet, Act 2, scene ii
But to the matter at hand, I LIKE auto sigs, though I’d have no problem if the mods or admins wanted to limit their length.
P.S. No one seriously thinks Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I hope.
Well, Duh!
Any idiot knows it was Kit Marlowe. . . .
Roger or Francis? (You can probably find people claiming both.)
Or what about Queen Elizabeth? No one would believe that a mere woman could do something as complicated and tricky as writing a play in free verse, so she got this buddy of hers…
No! No! It was the Earl of Essex! (Or was it Exeter? Oxford? ) How about Marco Polo – that guy could write! And that Prester John character could’ve done it, too.
Who was it who said “Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by Shakespeare – it was another guy with the same name”?
Oh, and on the actual topic (deep, deep sarcasm on that last word): I don’t really care either way about auto-sigs, but I desperately want to go back to having sigs attached to individual posts, rather than globally changed whenever the user makes a new sig. This new system, frankly, is stupid. I don’t want to change my sig on posts from November; I want to change it starting right now. (Whose brilliant idea was that, anyway?)
I’m in favor of people actually having to choose to implement a signature line. Originally, when we got the new software, I thought having the signature default to be on was great, but then quickly realized that on most of my posts (particularly when I was responding to a thread I had already posted on or was dashing off a quick one-liner) I didn’t want my sig line. And in any case, inadvertently omitting it was less of an annoyance than inadvertently adding it.
To deal with the issue, I deleted my sig line from my profile entirely, removing from circulation a perfectly good WallyM7 sig. I’d rather have the option to add it when I want to, rather than being required to remember to remove it.
Also, because sigs take computer time to look up, in the cause of delay reduction, I’d say we should do what we can to ensure that they are only used when the poster actively wants to.
Bill
What Ukulele Ike said. Squared.
Sigs suck. Oh, and smilies have got to go too.