Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!uunet!bfmny0!tneff From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Are signature lines distracting? Message-ID: <15070@bfmny0.UU.NET> Date: 6 Jan 90 15:32:14 GMT References: <659@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <15068@bfmny0.UU.NET> <662@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Lines: 27 Sometimes disclaimers can look silly, but when the author is posting from a corporate or institutional site -- SOME of whose posters and postings may in fact represent 'real' policy and be stuff the institution can be held accountable for -- it's often thought important for private, "recreational" posting to be dissociated from policy. It may not even be a decision the individual poster made -- the company or institution may have said so. Naturally as disclaimers became more prevalent we started parodizing them, because we parodize everything on this net. Vive la difference. My own opinion is that if you can't stand an article because of its signature, you need to read netnews a bit more -- or a bit less! But it would be nice if posters could easily vary their choice of whether and which signature to use depending on the context. In rn, you could do this by hacking Pnews, though I haven't. (Rn users note: If you copy Pnews to your own local 'bin' directory which appears early in your PATH, you can play around at will without affecting others. Just be careful.) It would be best of all if users took the time to READ their own postings after submitting them! I can't believe half of the bloopers that get sent out would survive if the authors saw their own handiwork... -- "DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!" /)\ Tom Neff "Roger....hatch blown!" \(/ tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET