[QUOTE=Troy McClure SF]
FWIW, I almost never notice who writes what unless their name appears in the body or
Whew. I scanned this in my notification email and thought "Satan is back?!?
I don’t.
-Smeghead
Apparently I’m pretentious. It just comes naturally to me. 
At work, I share logons at some workstations. There’s no way for people to know who sent an email unless we sign it at the bottom.
On another message board, we’ve had a problem with accounts being deleted causing posts to be credited to the next member who signed up – so when Bob (user number 615) gets deleted, Susie (user number 616) appears at the top of Bob’s AND Susie’s posts. Although no current accounts are deleted any more, the old ones would have to be fixed through a labor-intesnive process no one has yet attempted. In the archives, this can create longstanding confusion.
Some message boards I have used do not indictate the author of a quote, and having one’s name along for the ride with the text can be handy in finding references to one’s posts.
Less technically, a signature enables me to add adverbial or participial comments like “Belatedly, Sailboat” or “Sailboat, dreading the future”. I can also reach out less formally with “Sails” and indicate breeziness or terseness with “S.”
Additionally, my real name starts with an S, so for those friends who prefer to use real names because they feel it’s intimate, I can sign “S.” without giving anything away to stangers. It’s like a secret wink.
Plus, I feel it ties things up neatly without being dismissive.
I do not generally use “regards” unless I feel that I am in danger of hurting someone’s feelings. In emotionally fraught conversations, I will use “regards” to indicate respect without obsequiousness, and to clarify that I am not directly attacking the person I might be contradicting.
Never once has it seemed to me that another poster was pretentious just for signing. So it might be subjective matter, I submit.
Regards,
Sailboat
One might ask why bother signing a letter if your return address is on the outside of the envelope. Or if the name is somewhere in the body of the letter/document. In both of these cases though it is a widely accepted convention and causes very little societal unrest.
Human concentration tends to be the best at the beginning and at the end of a task. Mentioning a point at both the beginning and the end of a letter, speech, etc. has long been a strong method of ensuring that point is understood and retained in the audience. If the name is only at the head of a document a person will often not remember it by the time they are finished. The repetition of the author’s name or some sort of individual signature at the end strenghtens the association of the work with the writer. This is well known and accepted outside of electronic communication. Electronic communication, with the ability to retrieve the author’s name very easily(it even stays on the page the whole time with most email readers) make it less necessary to include the sign-off, but still the fundamental fact is humans absorb and retain the information better if it is both stated at the beginning and repeated at the end.
Academic writing guidelines acknowledge this aspect of human mental focus/concentration behaviors. Most guidelines will tell you the primary point, or thesis, of your paper should be stated in both the first and last paragraphs of an essay. Message board posts are not generally communicating a thesis as much as they are the ideas of a single person. As such the usage of repeating the name/nickname/handle of the person putting forth the idea serves much the same purpose in increasing retention and association of the name to the ideas.
Some of us also tend towards the long-winded. Having the sign-off helps people keep things straight when the username has scrolled off the top of the screen.
Enjoy,
Steven
People have been repeating version of this logic and it’s flawed. Rules which applied to written conversation do not apply necessarily to electronic ones. Signatures on letters and memos serve to indicate that a document is complete becuase of the possibilty of pages becoming seperated. The same rationale applies to the envelope.
In emails a signiture is also not out of place because depending on the reader the email address may not be visible, and emails are frequently printed out. Most importantly emails are not conversational in nature.
Message Boards are conversational in nature. Adding a signature to a comment within a conversation serves to imply finality. Typically you see Mods closing their official mod-type posts with sigs. That’s a acceptable usage because they indeed have authority and finality in their decisions. A poster signing a conversational response to a debate can come accross as patronizing. I imagine it as if you were IMing someone and signed a opinion, it would make the other person say WTF?
The argument that people forget the name between the beginning and end of a post seems to really insult the intelligence of your readers.
This is exactly the type of thing I refer to. Using Acedemic Writing Guidelines to a post on a message board, a decidedly casual forum, comes across as especially pretentious and has a sense of self-importance.
What about those of us that sign off with our real name and not username?
Especially when the user name is Gender Neutral?
Jim (It is also a habit as I did this Jim without even thinking about it)
This is admittedly a greyer area. Though 80% of your replies likely are to gender neutral topics making it somewhat situational.
Signing to clarify gender or as a device to add additional information about oneself is not something that’s peevish. Though doing every single time sounds more like a rationalization of a habit than an intent for clarity.
Omni-, not completely unreasonable
Now that is cool and I am sure you’re right it is partially a rationalization.
From a guy whose username implies he has complete knowledge of everything.
Happy
There’s a few things you should probably consider. First, many of us learned how to write a proper letter before the age of email or message boards and we learned to sign our name at the end of our letter so we continue to do so to this day. Secondly, depending on the nature of the message board it might have been necessary to sign your name to let others know when the message ended. This might not be applicable today but things were different way back in 1989. Thirdly, I know of no convention that dictates signatures are against the rules of message board etiquette. In all my years of calling up BBS’ back when a 9600 baud modem meant something all the way through today I have only heard the comlaint against signature made here. Which makes me suspect it’s not really a problem at all. (1)
I really don’t see how message board are more conversational in nature than email. At any rate you’re right that a signature comment does serve o imply finality but in this case it just means that the poster has finished posting. It doesn’t imply that the discussion is over any more than signing your name to an email.
Marc
There are rules to writing even when writing informally. For example we prefer that people use proper punctuation, spelling, and something the resembles proper grammar. aS yOu SaiD tHEre aRE LesSeR mESSage BOarDs aNd U wIl fiNd All sORts oF sTrAngE waYs oF wRiTinG On tHeM. While the SDMB is rather informal we do discuss some rather lofty ideas about politics, religion, philosophy, literature, etc, and it’s tough to have a serious dialogue with someone who doesn’t follow some basic rules of communication.
Of course I’m not saying not signing your name to a post puts someon on the same level who types, “R U ready? Gr8,” but signing your name to a post or following basic language rules doesn’t make one pretentious either.
K.B.E. Marc D. Gibson, III. B.A., M.A., Ph.D., D.D.S., M.D., Esq.
This practice bothers me too, for the exact same reason. It feels utterly strange to have such an element of one-shot-at-a-time, letter writing style infused into what isn’t that far away from real-time chat.
Brilliant!
Sure it is. An email is a lot more like a letter in a lot of ways: you write one, send it off, and hopefully get one back later. A message board has a much different atmosphere to it, and is more like a conversation. See upthread analogy to the coworker who ends his turn in the conversation with “Regards”. It’s utterly silly in this particular form of communication, if you ask me.
Or, it was appropriate everywhere else but not here at the SDMB. Have you considered that option?
Well that may be part of the problem right there. I don’t normally “chat” on this message board or any other. I view message board behavior as much more akin to an extended email exchange than a conversational chat. I acknowledge that a lot of people do chat on message boards. This disconnect in the way we perceive the board may explain why some feel compelled to sign off their posts and others see it as a little eccentric.
–Ray, who doesn’t normally sign his name anyway but can understand why people do.
Fair enough, but I’ve seen a small handful of posters who do use the Boards in conversational style yet still sign their posts, meaning again that the office analogy fits well.
“Decidedly casual”? How much time do you spend in GD? GD is where I spend most of the time when I’m here and being “casual” in there almost invariably winds up being “sloppy.” The rules of formal communication are designed to minimize confusion over intent and content. If you’ve spent much time at all in GD you understand how frustrating it is to have posts misrepresented, misunderstood, or hijacked because of some ambiguity introduced through sloppy writing. Years ago people thought Wiki pages(which allow anyone to edit them) would never be good for anything because of the obvious data integrity problems. They were relegated to people’s personal pages or interactive blogs and were “decidedly casual”. Today Wikipedia has shown us the opposite can also be true. Message boards are simply a medium and one can use them formally or informally.
Again, GD, and to an extent GQ, is a different world. When your post contains links to citations you expect your reader to stop and read in the middle of your post the refresher on the author of the post is very useful. If you consider it insulting please understand it is not meant that way at all. I lose track of things during a post which links out to three news sources, two opinion pieces, and has a couple quotes. Having a second data point for who authored that bit of research helps.
Enjoy,
Steven
Heh heh.
Ah, I see, you need to add your signature line because this thread is in GD.
Which is exactly why it’s only ever appeared in this post, and just this once: I agree with you completely!
Still, it’s nice to have it sitting there; it allows me to go look at it occasionally, buff it up and think ‘hey, I actually blipped on someone’s radar for once. Go me!’ - which is very reassuring since whenever I’ve participated in a ‘do I know you?’ thread, the response has always been ‘I don’t recognise this poster’. sniffle
(And of course there is the bonus that on a message board like this, the odds are better than average that my sig will be relevant to a topic some day. Can’t hurt to keep it in the corner until that time. 
)
Back to the original topic, I really appreciate it when posters do sign their messages (Thanks Jim!) because - ironically, I suppose, with my gender-neutral username - I like to know what gender they are. It sort of turns names into people and makes them easier to relate to… I have no idea why, but it does. Too many years of online gaming under my belt, perhaps, but I just like to feel I’ve seen a little of the person behind the name. shrug
In my case, I am noting which participant of my androgynous identity is actually posting.
I also find it helpful when scrolling rapidly through a long thread to be able to identify my posts from either direction. It is not a large thing, but then, I would not have thought it large enough to evoke angst and despair among those who do not choose to follow the same practices.