Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!dsi!dan
From: dan@dsi.COM (Dan Mick)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Signatures
Message-ID: <283@dsi.COM>
Date: 20 Oct 89 22:20:12 GMT
Reply-To: dan@dsi.UUCP (Dan Mick)
Organization: KFW Corporation, Newbury Park, CA
Lines: 32

Okay, so I've been reading news for a month or so, and nine times out of ten,
the message has 20 lines of quotation, 10 lines of signature (or more), and
2 lines of new information.

*MEGA-FLAME LIGHTING NOW...*

Why the h*** is this permitted?  Isn't the whole point of netnews to be ever
cognizant of your information bandwidth?

Over-quotation is *specifically* warned against and rn tries to prevent it (or
Pnews, whichever), but I read lots of messages every day that pull back all 
sorts of stuff that's not useful at all to the discussion at hand...

And are .sig files a total waste or what?  I don't want to see your misspellings
of names, misquotations of respectable authors and humorists, your dog's 
boarding kennel phone number, and what *you* consider to be witty, along with
five thousand different ways to reach you on the net...dammit, I've got a
Reply-To line already, and an organization, and if you can't reach me that
way, you can use a phone book!

It's just amazing to me that the net community goes to such great lengths to
prohibit RTFM questions and "Me too" responses and even suggests policies like
"don't post a followup, rather reply by mail and let the poster summarize",
and then on the other hand, wastes so much space routinely with such utter
crap as .sigs and quoting and ASCII pictures in .sigs, for God's sake!!  It
sure seems like hypocrisy.

Then again, I never see much of the above from Doug Gwyn or Spaf or Chuq or
any of those who publicly announce things about policy...so maybe there are
just about 90% total idiots on the net?...

No .sig file for me!