@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?
Whether or not you should allow automatic signatures and, if so, in which form, is of course a matter of great debate. Give users the freedom, and they shall abuse such a power.
I personally find automatic signatures, such as they appear on typical phpBB forums, incredible annoying, because not only do they allow for extremely flashy images, which contrast enormously with the website’s colour scheme (which makes the whole page harder to read), but also animated GIFs, which can be even more annoying.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t allow animated GIFs on a forum, but not in a user’s automatic signature.
Perhaps the best solution would be to allow only a small amount of text, with minimal mark-up, and display the text under each post in a small font and a light color.
Give me animated gif avatars or give me death
I am tending towards sigs being a plugin as opposed to part of core.
edit we have no intentions of having sigs a default on feature
I might be an extremist but I don’t even understand the benefit of short, text only, signatures. They do not add anything to the conversation other than clutter.
If a user wants to communicate something to the world, then the “About me” text seems to be a reasonable place.
Obviously, the Discourse team knows better about what the community wants and what’s reasonable.
i’ve found that signatures only serve to take away from the conversation and shift the focus towards irrelevant information about the poster.
I always disliked signatures. They don’t bring anything to the discussion and are just distracting.
Please no signatures. User’s avatar and username are just fine and enough.
I think some information should pop up when you hover over a user’s icon, but signatures only add clutter
I agree that automated signatures don’t really add anything to the discussion and only make scanning the text harder as there is a lot of automatically inserted stuff that’s totally unrelated to the discussion
I would love to see a mouseover effect for profiles and @ mentions though where your signature/bio could be shown.
I don’t know. Signatures (text only of course) as I’ve seen them on forums elsewhere don’t seem to be used for information that would fit in an “about me” section. People tend to use them to memorialize an interesting exchange or when someone (important/famous) compliments them. With reasonable restrictions (no more than 2-3 lines, or one quote tag) I find them rather useful at times, and not enough of a bother to remove.
I think the real value of Discourse is that it boils down the page content to what you need to see to follow the discussion. How does a signature add to that? Allowing opt-out doesn’t help either; a random web user landing on a forum page as part of a Google search is still going to find that forum page cluttered with animated gifs, highlighted text and so on.
I applaud a cleaner, more minimalist format, with any additional information about a user kept in their user page, and this would be a great compromise, IMO.
not enough of a bother to remove but are they enough of a bother to implement or can they be left unimplemented?
I don’t understand how you can get away with not enjoying irrelevant information being injected into the middle of conversations.
mootinator - Over 9000 Cheevos!
blah blah blah
response response response
thing thing thing
jco - MASTER cheevos expert. I have all the cheevos. Be cool like me, be a cheevos god.
Yeah, can you just come in on Saturday, that would be great [[[LooksLikeSomeoneMondays.JPNG]]]
If you have the user’s profile linked, why do you need a signature?
Signatures exist in email / NNTP for because of not having very much context in the headers.
Because if we didn’t have signatures however would you know about my cheevos?
I mean, seriously.
jco - MASTER cheevos expert. I have all the cheevos. Be cool like me, be a cheevos god.
Yeah, can you just come in on Saturday, that would be great [[[LooksLikeSomeoneMondays.JPNG]]]
PS: the sarcastic bit here is that we completely agree with you and we (moot and I) want to demonstrate how obnoxious most signatures are to most people. Obviously I can write a userscript that looks for this box to be shown on screen and then appends my signature text immediately, and uses localstorage to keep it across my browser sessions.
jco - MASTER cheevos expert. I have all the cheevos. Be cool like me, be a cheevos god.
Yeah, can you just come in on Saturday, that would be great [[[LooksLikeSomeoneMondays.JPNG]]]
Also, like with most forums, the current behavior I’m exhibiting is “don’t edit your posts, put a new one. Duh.” 
This is also a highly effective reason to not have the “same features as other forum software”.
jco - MASTER cheevos expert. I have all the cheevos. Be cool like me, be a cheevos god.
Yeah, can you just come in on Saturday, that would be great [[[LooksLikeSomeoneMondays.JPNG]]]
I wish we had signatures so you could learn moar about my cheevos and be as totally cool and awesome as I am.
jco - MASTER cheevos expert. I have all the cheevos. Be cool like me, be a cheevos god.
Yeah, can you just come in on Saturday, that would be great [[[LooksLikeSomeoneMondays.JPNG]]]
What do you want to put in your signature that you can’t put on http://meta.discourse.org/users/chronodekar ?