Why?

Update: How does asking for an explanation warrent a downvote?

My conclusion: The downvoter cannot justify their expressed opinions, so they relieve their frustrations by hitting the --.

Ah well, plenty more where they came from:)

There's nothing useful about having a "paste my favorite quote onto all of my posts" feature. Its a vanity feature. I wouldn't say that vanity features are a bad thing or that in PM's case we've gone over. I would say that it gets annoying to read the same damn quotes all the time. Or quotes, period. That's what homenodes can be used for. This isn't a well reasoned argument - I find signatures to be a vanity feature I would prefer that no one used.

As for being functional, I've found that people's signatures make searching for nodes difficult since sometimes the search matches the content of the signature. When this occurs, it is highly annoying. It has prevented me from searching for some things because I was overwhelmed by the number of nodes that matched because of the signature. I don't recall if I ever completed my search or not or whether I just gave up.

Anyhow, because I wanted to be fair about things I pulled the signatures currently in use on perlmonk's recent nodes. It works out that use of signatures for everything above 100 characters was 69% quotes, 15% vanity tags, 12% quality disclaimers, and then 1% licenses and useful stuff. The smaller signatures were nearly always salutations. I would draw from this that the sweet spot seems to be signatures at or around twenty to forty characters.

I'm not going to post any root level nodes wringing my hands about this and I'm not going to be serious about bugging people with useless signatures. It isn't worth the disruption to PM. I just want to note this once that I really do wish that you and the other people who are misusing this feature would please, quit it. Or at least nix all the vanity tag and quote stuff. At least the disclaimers and license stuff is at least useful.

Read more... (30 kB)

I ++'d. To paraphrase a dead old lady: the only evil thought is the refusal to think.

I'll take a bite at why I think they're less than useful.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

I like Fossas and you should too.

Conceptualizing the point:

for ( 1 .. 1_819 ) {
     show_same_sig();
}
[download]

Repetitive filler that would be consistently downvoted as anything else; like an OT SOPW that was 10 lines long without a point and then got posted again. And again. And...

I don't have a personal preference (they're easy to ignore and some vanity features are nice for the personality they convey) but the site already offers a user page without any real content or size restrictions. Personal statements, preferences, loves, philosophies, especially those that haven't changed in a year, or two, might sit better there.