Poll: June: What is your opinion on having a Signature.

Signatures are traditional since the early days of email, allowing a bit of personality to come through even in an impersonal thread. (Is this the problem on the U.O.F. [Unified Official Forum]; some don't want any personality to bleed through?) They also allow a place to put such things as your hardware and OS specs, which can be useful on a forum such as this to avoid having to constantly type them in.

That said, I think a lot of people go way overboard with signature spaces, billowing into huge animated graphics which hog bandwidth and slow down the process of just trying to read posts (I guess a concern mostly of those of us on dial-up), being quite distracting and leading to oneupmanship battles. One forum I was on was became almost unusable for me until the staff finally cracked down.

Mark me down as an old fuddy-duddy, but I think the four lines of text that for years was considered good etiquette is ample and usable, without overwhelming bandwidth constraints. The old traditional line width for email and newsgroups was 72 characters; hmm, 72 x 4 = 288, so I guess 160 characters seems a little tight; but if people can't maintain a little self-discipline, you have to draw a line somewhere.

I agree that animated images in a Signature would be distracting. I have used the signature area mostly for random pithy statements and one liners.

Exactly the kind of thing the signature was meant to be used for, as well as personal information such as your location and position, phone numbers and other personal stuff. Your use of your signature tells the rest of us something of your personality and world (galactic?) view.

With out signatures how would we know if folks have sense of humor or not. Besides we learn so much down there...

A bit of a double-edged sword that one.

Without a signature, your just another faceless grunt.

Apply that line of though to, saaay, ooooh, Mattb4 for example and, if you've ever seen his face - firstly there's the initial shock - then the days of drifting in and out of conciousness - the rehabilitation - the lost income from time taken off work - and no matter how many sessions you have with your shrink, that image is just burned on your mind like the retinal flash when you glance at the sun.

Any number of good and decent people who aren't faceless can't obscure the obscene horror unleashed when something like MattB4 is exposed to the world.

Ban signatures now.

I gave up exposing my self when the moans of Horror turned to shrieks of cruel laughter. And that was just my reaction from looking in the mirror, I shudder to think how anyone else would respond.

Signatures are an expression of freedom, so let them ring through the forums.  If signatures are banned then the Eds wins and we can't have that.

I'll get the strap, you start walkin him out back the wood shed. (eds that is) He WILL change his mind.
Have to change the lock on the scotch seller if'n he don't...
And besides I like my siggy Tell it all if ask me.

I think sigs say quite a bit about the poster.  So far from the sigs 
welan is lost but found
Eds is practically theoretical
Bdquick is a linux pc
Bozo is a disclamer
I'm absentminded
And  Matt is No
See we need sigs!

More accurately, Matt is in denial. Of what we have no indication. Reality, perhaps?

Denial is not just a way to move heavy stone blocks for pyramid construction.