Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Signature files
Message-ID: <1937@prune.bbn.com>
Date: 18 Aug 89 17:07:48 GMT
References: <15046@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
Lines: 43

In most cases, the news software automatically fills in most .signature
information, like the Organization and the E-mail address.  If it's
correct, why duplicate it?  As the world goes to Internet-style domains,
UUCP path examples become more and more pointless.  (They suffer their own
risks, too, in that they can get outdated -- I still see references to
ihnp4!)

Regardless of what the actual costs are, longer signatures cost more to
distribute and store.  The tend to be much more inane and useless, and the
folks who pay the bills would rather cut .signatures than newsgroups.

>I liked my old sig; I thought it was unique.
Yes, perhaps it was, the first time.  Maybe even the second time.  By the
third or fourth time -- and certainly by the twentieth time -- it is
annoying.  Don't you just hate it when you hear the same joke or anecdote
three or four times?  It's the same with .signatures.  And isn't it REALLY
bad when it happens several times in the same day?  That's EXACTLY what
happens when you read news once a day -- I see several articles by the
same person, with the same .signature; at least the article text is
different each time!

>                                              I also spent some time writing up
>the design, thinking of a quote, etc.
Some people feel a compelling need to make their signature be a statement
of who they are.  I never quite understood this:  your postings should
contain the content; how you sign your name is should be meaningless.  I
should admit, however, that this attitude did not come early; I added
patches to the NOTESFILE system to support .signatures, and I used to have
a silly song quote there.  To quote an ex-colleague:  "What can I say, I
grew up."

With few exceptions, the more experienced and respected posters on Usenet
have minimal (Henry Spencer, "trish") or no (Doug Gwyn, Rick Adams) signatures.
This is not coincidental.

>= UMBRELLASWORD throwingplatter PLATTERCOVERSHIELD coatstaff CUTLERYLOCKPICK  =
The first time I saw this I thought it was a cute mixture of words.  Now I
think it's just plain stupid.

	/r$
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