Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!thep.lu.se!magnus
From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Are signature lines distracting?
Message-ID: <9001091605.AA28101@thep.lu.se>
Date: 9 Jan 90 16:13:30 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 86

I think the people who are offended by other people's signatures should 
consider that each medium of communication has its own rules, written
or unwritten. 

If you write an article in a newspaper, you sign it with your name, 
nothing more. It would certainly look very strange if you added
some totally irrelevant quote of purportedly humorus nature.

However, on Usenet this is the accepted way of signing your articles!
OK, the written guidelines recommend that your signature shouldn't
be more than four lines long, but many people have far longer signatures,
and their readers seem to accept this, anyway it's very seldom someone
complains about it.

You may find it disturbing if a serious and well-written article
on a serious subject ends with a joke, a frivolous (or just irrelevant)
quote or even a disclaimer. In that case, try to think of the 
joke (or whatever it is) as something that is *not* a part of the
article, just as all those lines about "Message-ID" and so on
at the top of the page aren't part of the message.

Do you get equally angry if there is a silly advertisment next to an
serious newspaper article about AIDS or some other serious subject?
Probably not, because you're used to it. Try to get similarly used to the
specific ways of the sub-culture that is called Usenet!

Also remember that some organizations *force* their employees to add
a disclaimer to everything they write "privately" using the 
organization's mail address. 

And don't forget the historical precedent: Cato major (i think) who 
ended *all* his speeches in the Roman Senate by demanding the
destruction of Carthage!



Personally, I think you *should* add a (reasonably short) signature
to all serious articles for the following reasons:

If somebody signs his article just "John Smith", he is hard
to distinguish from all the other 35,763 John Smiths on the net.
(His mail address is not much help if it's something like
"john@xx.yyy.zzz.edu")
On the other hand, if he uses a distinctive signature, readers will
instantly recognize it: "Aha, it's *that* John Smith".

The signature is a place where one can show a little creativity and
personalize one's messages. After all, one Usenet message looks very
much like another! This, of course, applies mostly to the shorter
messages (of a few lines or so) that are too short for personal 
writing style to show through.

The return address shown in the article header is often a, say, UUCP
address, which isn't of much use if you only have bitnet access.
The signature is a good place to put alternative addresses. (How many
articles of the type "I tried to mail the author of article <XXXX> but
the mail bounced, so I'll post it here instead" have we seen? How much
net.bandwidth has been wasted that way?)



Finally, I'd like to say that of course you shouldn't overdo it. 
Adding a thirty-line signature to a two-line message is, indeed, pure
waste of bandwidth, and tends to irritate even me.

(But, still, the most efficient way there is of wasting bandwidth is to
write and flame other people for wasting bandwidth).


I'm probably going to be thoroughly flamed for this, but I'll survive
(hopefully).



Magnus Olsson		     	| \e+ 	   /_	      
Dept. of Theoretical Physics 	|  \  Z	  / q	      
University of Lund, Sweden	|   >----<	      
Internet: magnus@thep.lu.se	|  /	  \===== g 
Bitnet: THEPMO@SELDC52 		| /e-	   \q	      



P.S. I hope the net.gods can forgive me for having a *five* line signature,
but I couldn't fit the Feynman diagram into four lines. Anyway, I've deleted
the frame and the stupid quote, which saves *five* entire lines of 60 characters.
Wow! That's 300 entire bytes of net.bandwidth saved!