Important Reminder About Signatures

[#1 Taln Fan he/him]

Recently there's been a lot of signatures that have been breaking forum policy, especially the following rules:

On 4/7/2020 at 3:12 AM, LadyLameness said:

Signatures;

• Signatures are restricted to approximately four single lines. Images and text must be contained within this height for readability purposes.
• Total images size is restricted to 500x100 pixels (can be multiple smaller images or single 500x100 image).
• Animated GIFs should not be used as they cause issues with the site as well as those who are sensitive to flashing images.
• Sanderson Elimination scorecount are not to be recorded in signatures.
• Spoiler boxes are not allowed in signatures.
• Signatures are disabled on mobile.

Starting tomorrow, any violations within a signature will be removed by a moderator. Though it's not explicitly specified in the policy, please also make sure all text is only the default size, and remove any empty lines. Vertical space is already at a premium on the forums, and longer sigs can make it tedious to scroll through topics. If you want to display more information, you can do so in your About Me on your profile. 

[Chaos he/him]

I'd like to chime in as well, because I realize this comes across as very fun-policey. What's the problem with giant signatures?

The problem is that when you are scrolling through a topic, particularly with many short posts, big signatures add a lot of vertical space and noise. Compare this to what is now an objectively more popular way to communicate, Reddit, and it's just so much easier to read a sequence of text there. 

Forums have had much less membership over the last ten years. Let's try and not accelerate that process more and make the forums look nice for all, so people want to join in.

[Shatter He/Him]

Maybe have signatures be like spoiler boxes?

[Chaos he/him]

12 hours ago, The Shattered Cosmere said:

Maybe have signatures be like spoiler boxes?

Two things here.

First, our ability to do software upgrades is something we now value very highly. Any customization has the heavy cost of making sure it works with updated versions. So short answer, the software doesn't work that way, and sure we could theoretically change it but that would be unwise.

Second, I think you are misconstrue the purpose of signatures. It's supposed to be a small amount of information in a short space that is always visible on all the posts. Like an email signature, right? It requiring a click does allow for additional information to be present... but imagine if twenty different people posted in a topic. Do you think people would actually click on those separate boxes? I don't think so. People would click on one or two, and then would rarely bother from there. So, honestly, this idea fundamentally destroys the nice thing about sigs, in that it is ambient information people actually see.

Of course, on mobile there isn't space, and you can certainly set things on desktop to ignore certain people's sigs or turn them off. But I'd argue that it's still a terrible experience if you come in and you see all these sigs being huge. That makes people more likely to just turn them all off, and that would mean you've contributed to people never seeing that info.

Sigs aren't biographies or complete listings of all things about you. Certainly people use it for a variety of things, such as listing theories they like or Shardbuddies. Go for it! But like, is it necessary to have say... thirty Shardbuddies? There's an amount where now no one is reading them at all or cares. 

So, what we are trying to do is have some reasonable restrictions on sigs so it's not this monstrous catastrophe but still allows for a lot of freedom. Certainly when the Shard occurred, Shardbuddies weren't a thing (probably because none of the social media-y features existed, and you couldn't tag people), and so from the admin perspective you want to allow such freedom and creativity. But I do think limits are necessary in order for the system to have buy-in. People may not remember (or be alive) to remember early 2000s forums where forum sigs had tons of images, and god, that was obnoxious.

Anyway, if you want more detail, I think About Me is a far more appropriate space. For sigs, brevity is the soul of wit! Your sig, Shattered Cosmere, does a really good job of summing up a lot of info about you in a compact way, and that's nice! 

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

First of all, is there any way to know if you're violating this as a mobile user? Sure, I can edit my sig, but I have no idea how many lines it takes up on a computer, which is presumably the method we're using to measure.

Also:

On 3/31/2025 at 9:52 AM, #1 Taln Fan said:

Sanderson Elimination scorecount are not to be recorded in signatures.

Really want to know the history of this and what we did.

[Chaos he/him]

I admit I am a little confused as to the efficacy of editing a field that only appears on desktop and doing so on mobile, since you would literally never see it on mobile. I suppose you can view the page as Desktop through your mobile browser and attempt to adjust the view properly, if you really had to. But if you're on mobile, I suppose I'd just say keep it short! 

As for SE, I don't remember specifically but probably just to keep things cordial and less competitive overall.

[little wilson she/her]

On 4/1/2025 at 10:13 PM, The Unknown Flame said:

Really want to know the history of this and what we did.

From what I recall, many SEers had sigs that had the score count, plus at least one image, maybe some quotes, etc. They were obnoxiously large sigs and stood out in a not-great way. I think if the sigs had been just the score count, things might be different, though I think then there would've been issues with competitiveness, as Eric noted.

This was like 10-11 years ago so I may be missing something, but that's what I remember.

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

May I ask why spoiler boxes aren't allowed in sigs?

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, NerdyAarakocra said:

May I ask why spoiler boxes aren't allowed in sigs?

It was already answered above (Second/Third paragraph - depending on if you count the first one-liner as a paragraph)

More to the point, if you are going to need a "click" to see the information, it's just better (less clutter, saves space, less scrolling) to link your about me page and put all the info there. 

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

15 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

It was already answered above (Second/Third paragraph - depending on if you count the first one-liner as a paragraph)

More to the point, if you are going to need a "click" to see the information, it's just better (less clutter, saves space, less scrolling) to link your about me page and put all the info there. 

That was in response to a different question - Shattered Cosmere wanted to know why spoilers couldn't essentially be spoiler boxes. I understand the reasons that Chaos gave but am still a little unclear on why more information about something you said (i.e. "check out my artwork here [[Links in spoiler]]) couldn't take up one of the lines in your signature.

[Treamayne]

2 minutes ago, NerdyAarakocra said:

That was in response to a different question - Shattered Cosmere wanted to know why spoilers couldn't essentially be spoiler boxes. I understand the reasons that Chaos gave but am still a little unclear on why more information about something you said (i.e. "check out my artwork here [[Links in spoiler]]) couldn't take up one of the lines in your signature.

But in that case why not just make the words "Artwork here" a link and not have a spoiler box to open?

Compare thiese two lines with 

Spoiler

This spoiler box, while closed, takes up 1.5x the vertical space of those two typed lines above - so two lines plus a spoiler box is more than doubling the vertical congestion for scrolling while also making the information you want to share not visible.
That number increases significantly if a user starts opening all of those spoiler boxes. 

 Which was the  point of Eric's post above:

On 4/1/2025 at 11:49 PM, Chaos said:

misconstrue the purpose of signatures. It's supposed to be a small amount of information in a short space that is always visible on all the posts. Like an email signature, right? It requiring a click does allow for additional information to be present... but imagine if twenty different people posted in a topic. Do you think people would actually click on those separate boxes? I don't think so. People would click on one or two, and then would rarely bother from there. So, honestly, this idea fundamentally destroys the nice thing about sigs, in that it is ambient information people actually see.

 

 

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

3 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

But in that case why not just make the words "Artwork here" a link and not have a spoiler box to open?

Compare thiese two lines with 

  Hide contents

This spoiler box, while closed, takes up 1.5x the vertical space of those two typed lines above - so two lines plus a spoiler box is more than doubling the vertical congestion for scrolling while also making the information you want to share not visible.
That number increases significantly if a user starts opening all of those spoiler boxes. 

 Which was the  point of Eric's post above:

 

 

That was assuming that links to all relevant things would take up multiple lines.

However, I didn't realize that spoiler boxes took up more space than a normal line - that makes more sense.

[Chaos he/him]

In addition to the answers given, lots of people would do things like have extensive nested spoiler boxes, and other shenanigans.

[BigBadBagsworth He/him/his]

Wait... how do I add a signature?

[SpartanBrigade He/Him]

1 hour ago, Radon said:

Wait... how do I add a signature?

Go to your profile, then account settings, then on the menu on the left you should see an option for signature with a little pen icon

Edited May 14, 2025 by SpartanBrigade