I don’t have an opinion on this. Just want to say and ask this:
The past has proved that people create the sig carefully, then leave it unmaintained for years. Experience learns this.
What the heck is wrong with people making an effort? Why do we aim for a world where people can no longer read, think and write, where everything needs to be easy, where in the end our vocabulary will be reduced to “Meow, Meh, Huh, <12 nasty words here>”.
Some of us will remember that users hid self-promotion, spam and such behind emojis. Are we sure this will not be possible?
Is anyone aware what can be done from markdown? And, if you disable markdown for the sig, what will that look like?
Like said, I don’t really have an opinion. That said, I am pretty annoyed about the idea that everything needs to be effortless. It makes me wonder why that is.
Interesting…
Didn’t know what I was starting when I asked the question.
But am getting a bit of a giggle out of it, as I can distinctly remember (I think - no, don’t ask me to point to posts), but when the forums changed to discourse, and users no longer could create a signature, there was talk about “Yes, down the track, signatures will be possible”…, and most people seemed agreeable to that…
Ah well, time changes everything.
Sigs were invented because there was a need for them and I never had any issues with them. Nor should a sig be limited in scope, it’s a freedom of expression question.
Nope. Not in civilized, technical help forums. There is no need for signatures nowadays. Have a look at other forums what useless, offensive and whatever signatures are used. They serve no purpose except self-promotion and “funny” cat pictures.
There would only be an additional burden for the mods and admins to monitor if there are offensive, explicit, illegal links and other content. Not everybody is mature and knows how to behave in a technical support forum.
And the “freedom of expression” (as you call it) ends where the CoC starts.
No, no², no⁴ and no⁶. I need to shut up here, otherwise I might get so mad whilst writing that I will definitely violate the CoC ( en.opensuse.org/Code_of_Conduct ).
You can add some personal information to your profile (profile icon → “profile” → “preferences” → “profile” → “about me”) which any interested user can see when clicking on your avatar or the user name next to it. IMHO this is the best of two worlds: Anyboy interested can see it on demand, but it doesn’t clutter the forum content; you can still read the content of the whole thread top to bottom without being thrown off track by signatures.
I recall a certain German language openSUSE forum (hosted outside opensuse.org) that automatically adds a legal disclaimer to each post. I find that very disturbing.