Are post Signatures really a thing of the past?

[xuhdev (Hong Xu)]

Not a troll question, a genuine question:

@Falco

We all know forum signatures are a relic of the past …

Do you have a reference? This is pretty new to me

[Bas (Bas van Leeuwen)]

Discourse has taken a pretty strong “signatures don’t belong in core” since its foundation, see for example this post from 2013.

Automated Signatures?

@codinghorror has already PM’d me that THIS implementation of Discourse discourages manual signatures. But what about automated signatures, like we see on other forums? (the forum software draws a horizontal line below the post and prints the custom signature) Some folks don’t like them and in the userCP, they can be turned off. Here? I can’t find the option anywhere at all. Is it on the cards or only through plugins?

Now of course, the beauty of the software is that it’s fully customizable, so if you really want signatures, there is an official plugin for it

Discourse Signatures

Summary Discourse Signatures adds old school forum signatures to Discourse. Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-signatures Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse We all know forum signatures are a relic of the past, but there are still a lot of communities that really love them. Since Discourse is I crafted a plugin that lets us take back our much loved (gif animated) signatures! [example si…

[merefield (Robert)]

Yes. You only have to click on an avatar to get more User information and don’t have to suffer scrolling and scrolling lots of information irrelevant to the current Topic.

[piffy]

Signatures are definitely a relic of the past. The rise of mobile makes screen real estate a lot more value so it’s unwieldy to let people arbitrarily fill up most of the space with junk.

However, what’s lost when signatures are gone is the ability to express yourself or your personality outside of your avatar and username.

So on my forum we tried to strike a balance by allowing users to choose from a set of small predetermined spirites. It minimizes space used while still giving people another way to express themselves.

Gone are open-ended signatures but we don’t have to throw out the full baby with the bathwater.