People who make this joke bug me.
Yer pal, Satan.
Ah, I guess I just remembered the “one sig per thread” rule and not the inexplicable “but this kind of sig in every single post is fine” exception.
So, I retract–it isn’t against the rules, just really stupid.
Aw jeez, not this shit again.
I like the sigs at the end of posts because I don’t read the headers, unless I’m curious who would say such a thing. It is convenient for me to come to the end and not have to look back up.
Also I want to note that I have stolen Shodan’s ‘regards’ as my sign off for my business emails just for the plethora of meaning that he uses it to imply. Thanks for introducing me to that.
Search for:
**Regards,
Shodan **
That’s right. To be fair, that’s a relatively recent change.
How do you form any impressions about users as people, then, if you never read who’s saying what? And how could it mean anything to you to know who’s writing a particular post, since you’ll have no idea what else they’ve written?
Also, how do you make yourself **not **read the header? Don’t you just kind of absorb the text as you skim by it on the way from the previous post?
Here is a past thread on the issue: Valete, Vox Imperatoris
If we banned redundancy, this place would be a wasteland. And the OP would never have happened.
Redundantly yours,
Chimera
Exactly the same thing would happen if we disallowed repetition, too.
And don’t get me started on duplication!
Can someone help me out here? I’ve just installed the FoxReplace add-on. It allows me to replace “Regards.” with “I am a retard”. I actually want to replace “Regards,<cr><some particular user name>”. Now I’m under the impression that a \r or a
will allow this but I can’t get it to work. Does anyone know how to get this to work?
It does however work on the “Regards,”, and I find this oddly satisfying.
Also, thank god that twit Valete, Vox Imperatoris has stopped posting.
Man, am I waiting for this to go away. From either side, it’s getting very tiresome.
About the OP, you don’t like it, you think it’s stupid, don’t do it. I like it, for about the same reason as Oredigger, and some others. Personally, I think it’s usually fun, and it’s an individual thing, like wearing a particular hairstyle, or a pattern of speech or voice, that helps to identify someone. It’s one of the ways people get to be themselves, which is usually a pretty good thing.
Are you trying to kill the hamsters??
Hrm, a little bit like sign-offs at the end of forum posts, wouldn’t you say? See what I did there?
Yeah, there are plenty of annoying ways to distinguish yourself, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop when it’s pointed out that most people find it stupid and annoying.
The problem is the way that the human brain works. If everyone’s post contained a sign-off, you could skim past it. If *everyone *were forced to (logically) put their sign-off in their signature, people could choose to enable or disable it. But instead, you have a handful of people posting a signature that cannot be turned off, which is distracting, because it’s completely against the format of a typical forum post.
Or doesn’t.
Regards,
Shodan
And here’s the one before that: Vox? Valete? Globos meos lambe - The BBQ Pit - Straight Dope Message Board
I used to do it. I started doing it because it’s how I was taught to end correspondence back in the Middle Ages when I went to school and IMHO a message board is more a series of correspondences that a real time conversation. When I first began posting on message boards in the 1990’s I’m fairly certain it was rather more common ( though granted, hardly universal and not necessarily ironclad convention ).
I stopped doing it because it inexplicably ( to me ) seemed to drive people bonkers, it does seem to have become much more rare and I eventually decided it wasn’t a fight I really cared enough about to bother with. It’s trivial, really. But I still don’t think there is anything wrong with it :).
Awesomest post ever.
Exactly! The brains of people who sign off at the end of their posts don’t work, which is why they do it. I’m so glad you have this understanding of your own inadequacy.
Of course, taking this into consideration, perhaps I should stop mocking you for it–you can’t blame people for working to the best of their limited capacities, after all.