Let’s bring back post signatures. Why not? If you worry about them being too annoyingly huge, just limit the size or number of characters.
Cmon bro, let people define and express their ethos here. Otherwise this place aint no batter than some silly reddit crap.
You are welcome to add a signature if you really think it adds to your posts.
Personally, and without judgement, I do not think they do.
It’s not a signature, but it’s somethin.
Why not bring it to a vote? Let the ILP patrons decide if they think it’s worth it or not.
I actually don’t think this software can even do signatures. It would be an add-on, and likely a third-party add-on.
Why do you want a signature so badly?
I like to be able to see those extra details about people, and add my own about myself. Putting in a quote or two, or a small image or gif, or just a cool artistic signature of one’s name that the person feels like reflects them personally somehow…
I don’t see why that is so weird. It makes things more personalized, fun, creative, interesting.
I would understand limiting the size of signatures so they don’t get out of hand. Map out a physical number of pixels or whatever beyond which it won’t accept. But allowing something to let people uniquely identify themselves is reasonable, for the same reason you have profile pics/avatars. Would you consider getting rid of those, even though technically they are superfluous? Probably not.
But all that stuff can go on your profile, and that’s visible as a popup to anyone who clicks on your username. You can include an image as a background for the popup, and a banner that shows up when someone clicks through to your profile.
The only difference is that that information isn’t tacked on to each of your 3.7k posts. And it shouldn’t be, because it’s irrelevant noise in that context.
Ok then, feel free to remove profile pics/avatars then.
Why not just let people vote? If they reject the idea, I’m chill and accept that too. Idc either way but I think this is important. Let the people speak. You might be surprised.
The name of the person making a post is not irrelevant noise in the context of a post. Their life story, inspirational quotes, and favorite gif are.
Bro, I am not talking about their name. I said profile PICTURE. AVATAR, which means the image.
How is their little unique IMAGE important, when you already display their username? By your own logic you should have removed the images long ago. But you didn’t. Think about why.
Using your own logic, tell me why its necessary to let me represent myself here with an image of young Nicholas Cage next to my username.
Seriously. I am curious.
Also I do not want to be responsible for you removing profile pictures here. I was playing devil’s advocate. I like profile pictures. I am sure most users do. Just as I think most users would also like a little bit more customization of having a small signature space after their posts.
And you can easily prove me wrong by taking a poll of active users. I’ll accept anything over 10 regular users as a legitimate result.
You’re right, avatars aren’t necessary, and until the software change I never had one. And I wouldn’t have one still if this software didn’t create a default avatar if you don’t add an image.
But I’m not about to remove avatars, they’re useful and minimally obtrusive.
I’m not going to create a poll because I don’t want to give the impression that I will follow the result, but you are free to create one if you just want to show me I’m wrong.
Honestly, even if there were overwhelming demand I would still be reluctant to install and maintain a plugin for a feature I think makes the site worse. (I’m also not sure sure that the voting population is representative of the relevant audience – active users aren’t the only ones who see signatures)
Whatever dude. Avatars being “useful and minimally obtrusive” is exactly the point I am making about basic signatures.
So just admit you are bias against it, for whatever reason. It’s your site, you don’t need to apologize to anyone.
Signatures are not the same as avatars, as evidenced by the fact that the site supports avatars and they don’t satisfy you.
As I said, if you actually think a signature would add to your posts, you are free to paste inspirational quotes at the end of your posts. You don’t do that because you know that a signature on your posts is not worth the effort of adding a signature to your posts. Each signature is worth less to you than the effort of ctrl-c, ctrl-p. That is strong evidence that signatures are not valuable.
What you’d like is to be able to write something once and have it appear 3.7k times across the site. I can understand the appeal, but it doesn’t make the site better.
How dare you.
I don’t add my own signature because in part yes it would be stupid to have to copy and paste that every single time I post something, but also because it would be stupid and defeat the purpose of me being the only person to do that. I told you already, part of my desire for bringing back signatures is because I like to see them on other people’s posts, getting to know more about them. It brings more uniqueness and personality to this place. It helps people personalize themselves, makes it more appealing. There is literally no reason functionally or in terms of content and visual look of the website not to bring them back, like I said you can easily set limits if you are worried about people making signatures that are too super huge or whatever. But adding value to your site is worth less to you than admitting I have a good idea, so. Ok cool. Two can play the false assumptions game.
The reason not to is that they are visual clutter, they distract from the conversations, and they attract spam and abuse. I take you at your word that you like them and don’t mind, but most people don’t. And the problem is that the people who don’t like them don’t come to the site and complain about them, or vote against them in a poll, they just don’t come to the site, they silently move on to sites where the majority of the content on the page is the discussion of philosophy rather than posters’ mini-Myspace pages.
Yes, I can set limits, but then I or another moderator needs to police those limits. And in any case the appropriate limit is zero.
I think there may be a middle-ground on this. What I don’t want is off-topic content tacked onto everyone’s post. But there may be ways to add personalization in less cluttery, distracting ways. One thing that signatures do is ‘frame’ an individual’s posts, reinforcing the identification of the individual, in a sense making the post appear in that person’s voice. I wouldn’t be opposed to something that better fulfills that purpose than only the avatar/username (I’m thinking like a customizable background or frame color, or a banner image of approximately the same size as the avatar/username block.
Would something like that do anything for you?
I know I’ve been dismissive of your request here, and I apologize. I’m being a dick. I do actually really fucking hate signatures, but I also really do appreciate the feedback. As Franklin said, “Our critics are our friends”, and nowhere is that more true than on an online community where it’s very easy to just walk away silently. So thank you. I’ll look for some third-way options that might (partially) satisfy us both.