One of the first things I looked for when logging into the new reflector was where to edit my signature. Not finding such a facility, I performed a web search to determine how to accomplish this in Discourse.
I found a discussion on the forum for Discourse itself, wherein almost everyone involved made it clear that they believed signatures to be anywhere from nothing more than useless clutter to the incarnation of pure evil, and something which does not fit in with their vision of redefining the very concept of online discussion. As a result, it was declared that this functionality will never be included in Discourse itself, though it could be added if someone were to write an appropriate plugin. How avatars could be thought to be more valid than signatures is beyond me…
Perusing various threads on the new reflector, I find that virtually everyone here does exactly what I do: add a short signature, usually including name and/or call sign, manually, to each post. For this reason, I suspect that I am not the only SOTA reflector user who would appreciate signature functionality if it were to be added at some point in the future.
Karl, I personally find the lack of signature functionality to be just what I need. I don’t want a standard signature to appear at the end of any of my posts - instead, I simply append that which I consider appropriate to the subject, nature or tone of the post.
[quote=“DM1CM, post:3, topic:9216”]
Karl, I personally find the lack of signature functionality to be just what I need. I don’t want a standard signature to appear at the end of any of my posts - instead, I simply append that which I consider appropriate to the subject, nature or tone of the post.[/quote]
Bob,
Point taken. I would not advocate forcing signatures on anyone; indeed, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a forum in which the user didn’t have to enable them.
On the other hand, I (and I expect many others) always type the same thing. Apparently in contrast to the Discourse developers, I actually find that reasonable signatures on each post help me to follow the conversation between different users. They provide some differentiation between otherwise identically-formatted posts. I am sure that they would argue that this is the purpose of avatars, but my brain tends to focus more in line with the conversation itself.
Of course, my preference is the way messages were generally formatted when I first got on the internet: text only (monospaced and with light text on a dark background, ideally), with proper inline quoting, such as displayed by a client like Pine. I still use its spiritual successor, Alpine, on a Linux server for my main email account. Thank goodness Discourse doesn’t force top-posting! I’m still trying to get used to the way it displays quoted text…
Aye. Signature files (elsewhere) often end up containing all sorts of junk. It’s been that way since the early days of USEnet news groups. Once you’ve seen a signature once…
If people are left to sign off their posts the hard way, there’s much less repetitive junk… hopefully.
The official Discourse instructions suggest that signatures are redundant since every post is attributed and you have a public profile. In fact they recommend not signing posts at all.
In retrospect I’m actually thinking that signatures are somewhat redundant on this forum.
Here we all have a user name which is our callsign. This is unlike many other forums where people may care to call themselves “The Smoke of BC109” and other strange names.
It’s much easier to identify attribution to someones callsign!
I’m also liking the Avatars that are springing up, clearly showing the posters callsign.
This is useful from the top level view to spot who has been active in a thread.
<>april 1> PS - I’m selling these custom Avatars (sample ) at £3 each or 10 for £20 (Paypal accepted) <>/april 1>
PS I’m liking the new forum - thanks for all the hard work that’s been put in
) at ÂŁ3 each or 10 for ÂŁ20 (Paypal accepted) 
<>/april 1>