in reply to New Behavior for Signatures?

I don't understand why the .sig needs to be part of the node contents at all. Sigs are separate data like subject lines. If a user wants to edit a node, fill the empty edit box with JUST their preferred template (if any), and let them edit JUST their new node's contents. When the server renders a node to HTML, render the subject, then contents, then sig. Keep them separate.

Another web forum I frequent has a lot of Internet-newbies on it, and this forum code does the same thing: it inserts the .sig into an empty edit box, expecting the user to edit above that space. These users always put their new contents UNDER the -- line, or even under their name, because they're not familiar with the convention.

I'm sure this is just an artifact of slow growth on top of the Everything codebase, which never considered signature lines at all, or has much use for them.

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

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Re^2: New Behavior for Signatures? (yes!)
by tye (Sage) on Jun 03, 2004 at 23:48 UTC

    Appending the sig at rendering time appeals to me. Previous proposals to append the sig but only after "create" is pushed did not appeal to me (sorry, no time to explain ATM).

    You'd lose the ability to see how my sig has changed over the years, but I find that an acceptable trade-off.

    Best of all, it would prevent the frustration of super searching for information about the "Flort:Bangle" module and finding every single node by Tye because his stupid sig says "Flort::Bangle *rocks*!!" just because he wrote it.

    The problem of backward compat is not trivial and may be enough to prevent this change happening. But this idea is really starting to grow on me.

    - tye        

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