Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!rpi!tale From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Are signature lines distracting? Message-ID: Date: 12 Jan 90 05:10:29 GMT References: <659@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <15068@bfmny0.UU.NET> <662@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <1990Jan11.040733.405@waikato.ac.nz> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 55 In article tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes: >I agree very much with this sentiment. It is irritating to get to the >end of a posting and see as part of the automatically added .signature: In <1990Jan11.040733.405@waikato.ac.nz> spt@waikato.ac.nz (Simon Travaglia): > Surely what someone adds to their message is up to them? Of course it is; by automatically, I did not mean some random thing they have no control over. I was referring to the posting agent appending it for them. Also, "irritating" was the wrong word for me to use. Several people seem to be of the notion that it sets me frothing at the mouth or puts a dark cloud over my desk. I didn't quite mean that, but rather the way I find many commercials irritating. They don't make me feel bad at all, in fact sometimes they give me an extra laugh because of their inherent stupidity. It's the same thing with some instances of .signatures. > Otherwise we may as well just say "Standard Disclaimer" at the end of our > messages, meaning something like: [deleted] We might as well just not include anything about disclaimers. Read news.announce.newusers. Here, I'll save just a little bit of effort for looking this one up in "Rules for posting to Usenet": All opinions or statements made in messages posted to Usenet should be taken as the opinions of the person who wrote the message. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of the employer of that person, the owner of the computer from which the message was posted, or anyone involved with Usenet or the underlying networks of which Usenet is made up. All responsibility for statements made in Usenet messages rests with the individual posting the message. So basically the messages already all carry the disclaimer you want except reference to an individual's education, which seems like a really bozotic thing to put in your .signature anyway. Some employers still do require a disclaimer and I don't know what their precise policy is regarding them. I suspect they don't mean the "I don't know what I'm talking about anyway" ones. I've not seen anyone here complain about a clear disclaimer which says, "I speak for myself, not my employer." > Whatever, I quite like some of the signatures that come across. So do I. In fact, I like the ones that I come across of 8+ lines so much that I repost them locally and mail them back to the person responsible with the following appended: Please consider trimming this to four lines or less. The newsgroup news.announce.newusers has articles posted to it on a regular (roughly monthly) basis which include information on why this is a good thing. It will quite possibly save you some flames, too. -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))