Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Signatures Message-ID: <1989Oct24.102537.5508@twwells.com> Date: 24 Oct 89 10:25:37 GMT References: <283@dsi.COM> Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Lines: 75 In article <283@dsi.COM> dan@dsi.UUCP (Dan Mick) writes: : 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...* Please don't flame in news.newusers.questions. The new users will find out about flames without our help, and flames are rarely informational. : Why the h*** is this permitted? Isn't the whole point of netnews to be ever : cognizant of your information bandwidth? It is permitted because there is no one to forbid it. There is no central authority on the net. : 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... No kidding. And my reply to you no doubt will contain more quoted text than original text. Why do I, a not-so-new-user do this? Becaue I want to make sure that there is continuity. It is very easy to lose track of what is going on when an insufficient amount of context is provided. : And are .sig files a total waste or what? No, .signature files are not a total waste. I have one, with my name and e-mail address. : 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, One of the, so far unwritten, rules of netiquette: never comment, except humorously or positively, on someone else's signature. Why? Because the signature is a personal expression. You should no more attack a person's signature than you should attack what he sticks on his T-shirt. If you've read a message all the way to the end, it should be easy enough to skip a signature. Why worry about it? : 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! Well, maybe that's enough. And maybe not. As one who does a lot of e-mail, let me say that I'm glad when people take the extra effort to give me help in getting mail to them. Admittedly, sometimes this effort is misguided, but a polite note suggesting an improvement, as opposed to a flame, will likely get the route information reduced to something reasonable. : 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. But it is not. The purpose is *not* to save disk space. The purpose is to save time for the reader scanning the newsgroup. Disk space is, at best, a secondary consideration. Those suggestioons are to cut down on the *number* of messages, with the desire that readers of the newsgroups will have fewer messages to spend time ignoring. --- Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill bill@twwells.com