@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.
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 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 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.
I want to stress that I DO NOT get paid to post reviews or test products on this forum. Everything that is featured was bought by me or stated otherwise. Also, I do not offer money to feature anyone in my posts. Everything is contributed willfully and with honest intentions. If you are a company wanting me to review a product I will only give my honest opinion.
“…but a talking frog is cool!”
“…if one more person enters the building, it will be empty.”
“No, but I know where I am.”
“Yeah, her clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you, anyway.”
Signatures are a throwback to email and newsgroups where the body of the message was the only information one could glean from the post. You couldn’t tell if a person from an edu address was a professor or a student unless they told you so. You didn’t know if they wanted to be connected via other methods and how you might do that unless they added to their message.
On forums signatures morphed into a show n tell, especially when early forums had lousy user pages.
Now that forums support user pages with instant messaging addresses, twitter, Facebook, and even WoW identities, there is no practical reason to continue to support the signature.
Further, signatures break the flow of reading, are often abused even with strict limits, and introduce redundant duplication, since every one of your posts is going to have the same bit of information.
There will eventually be a plugin because many people believe its important to have them for those users who expect them, but the default discourse forum will not have them, and will expect people to use the user pages for that information, and the topic pages for on topic information, rather than littering them with little soapboxes everywhere.
Likes reduce clutter by stopping people posting messages saying how much they like a post. I do think you have a point though about putting the number of likes next to the heart