Other than copy & paste, is there anyway to create a signature to be automatically placed at the end of each post?
Awaiting your kind reply,
[INCANUS]
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I’d like to gently discourage that practice. You can add details to your profile which people can see by clicking on your avatar, but post signatures don’t really contribute to the discussion; they’re noise rather than signal. I remember being on forums in the early 2000s and having a busy signature (probably with animated gifs!) but I’m glad Discourse doesn’t operate the same way.
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I understand what you say, @Dannii .
Please excuse the clutter, then; it was not my intention: indeed, my profile has enough information in case anyone should wish to know more of me and/or how to contact me outside Intfiction.org
However, if the 
on my original post are any indication, I’m not the only interested party: not to say that this a poll or somesuch 
.
Signing off, briefly, I dare say,
[INCANUS]
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To articulate better than a simple , I thought it was a good question worthy of an answer. Was this an unused feature or something not supported by the forum at this time?
With that said, if signatures were implemented, I wouldn’t use one for reasons similar to @Dannii 's and I do believe wide adoption can make reading through a thread more of a slog than it already is.
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I’m quite fond of signatures, so long as they’re limited. Some forums I’ve been on allow pictures, GIFs, etc, and cover up more room than the actual posts themselves and you often need to really try to spot the posts in the midst of all the signatures. But small signatures which just contain basic information I’d be in favour of.
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One forum I’m on used to have signatures, but removed them because they kept getting abused by spammers. They would post something on topic (though usually suspiciously vague and/or in a reply to a thread no one had posted in for ages), and then a few days later they would update their signature with a link to some online casino, or quack remedy, or whatever. So that was annoying.
Then again, I don’t remember seeing any forum spammers here?
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Oh, they’re here, they just usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly.
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Signatures are kind of a relic from Usenet and make sense for a newsgroups feed where everybody was using different programs to download and import messages. The signature was configured in the newsgroup reader software to append your name or alias at the bottom of a post, though some would get fancy and could let the user create what was essentially profile information - your email, website, handle on IRC chat; some reader programs allowed you to create a list of random quotes or messages it would vary with each message or even a small logo or picture. These still work well for email - again where users are using individual software to read messages downloaded from a server.
As Dannii said, on the forum here it’s somewhat superfluous since every post already shows the author’s name at the top, and you can click the avatar icon to see the member’s user profile card which offers whatever information is shared in the profile.
I know some people still access a direct feed of the forum. I haven’t used it extensively but I believe the feed also configures each message with the user’s name at the top that is clickable to link the forum and the user’s profile.
You can even get fancy here and upload a background and feature a topic in your profile.
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Post signatures are a really poor use of space, especially when browsing the forum on mobile, where space is at a premium.
Signatures come from an epistolary tradition, where the letter can be easily separated from its envelope. Not so online.
In email and on Usenet, signatures provide a bit of additional value by showing where your message ends, and where the rest of the text is just the quoted reply.
On a web forum, signatures only provide value when they’re more than your name, e.g. including links or other profile information about you. But that’s really not good in a forum, especially on mobile. Here, additional information about you should only appear in your profile.
The Discourse software team opposes signatures
The forum FAQ here (which lays out the forum rules) https://intfiction.org/faq is based on the original Discourse default FAQ here: https://meta.discourse.org/faq
The original Discourse rules has this “Keep It Tidy” section:
Keep It Tidy
Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:
- Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Don’t post no-content replies.
- Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
- Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.
Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a New Topic.
Note that last bullet, “Don’t sign your posts.” A “feature” to sign your post isn’t “unused” or “not yet supported.” The Discourse team recommends against signing your posts at all, and will almost certainly never implement a feature to support it.
Note that this forum has deleted that bullet from our “Keep It Tidy” section.
Keep It Tidy
Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:
- Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Don’t post no-content replies. (This includes “BUMP”ing dead threads.)
- Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
I’m not sure who deleted the “Don’t sign your posts” bullet or why, but I, for one, agree with the original Discourse bullet “Don’t sign your posts,” and would support bringing that bullet back.
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I suspect we might have taken it out in the beginning during edits; someone probably went “Why can’t you sign your posts?”
Occasionally it might be warranted. I have before signed the bottom of a moderation group PM to denote I am specifically expressing what I wrote and not attributing my words to the entire group.
-Hanon
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Ha, I thought of this gag but was too lazy to execute it – kudos, this is spot on!
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I agree that intfiction is not suited for signatures. In contrast I think it works pretty well over at the Adrift forum (Example ), probably because we are not so many and like to put links to our games or Work In Progress in the signatures.
On intfiction the profiles can be used for this instead.
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I love that this is still your featured topic on your profile.
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Thanks for mentioning. I never look at my own profile card and hadn’t realized it was still that and have fixed it.
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