Why did forum signatures fall out of favor?

I always found them annoying in the first place.

Back in the day when forums were mostly listservs, they made sense as the sig was where you stuck your finger info, so others could look you up.

But once things switched to real forums with user profiles, the original purpose was redundant as that information could be found linked to the username. So people started cluttering them with little digital billboards instead.

At that point, it served no real purpose and wasted data and (with the advent of mobile browsing) screen real estate.

They get really repetitive and don't add much to the conversation.

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See the community I started at !samsondruggingthecat@lemmy.sdf.org !
Lemmy member since 2023.

Cause they were annoying as shit, and only a small class of users even liked them in the first place.

Back in the 90s, a lot of forums would also ban your ass if you had an obnoxious signature to boot.

Because they're redundant.

Because they're redundant

Because people got tired of scrolling past the same giant dog image at the end of every other post

There were some valid reasons to have them, if you go far enough back in history, but those reasons haven't applied for a long time. Meanwhile, signatures gradually evolved into a plague. They often took up more space than the posts and they were often brightly colored or animated. Sigs made reading the actual text harder while serving as a distraction.

As you might guess, I am glad to see them gone. What used to go into sig blocks can now go into your profile. Anyone who's interested can just click. It's a much better setup all around.

Because forums fell out of favour.

Long answer: internet services became easier to use for non-technically savvy people. It's no coincidence that as internet access broadened, sites like Facebook gained popularity because they gave people premade, customisable pages that could allow them to express themselves to others and engage in discussion.

People who were using forums 20+ years ago were using them on a computer or laptop, and had more screen real estate. They could make a small signature image line and still not take up much space relative to the rest of the page.

I am looking at this on a phone right now, as you (probably) are. These screens are so much better than those, but also much smaller. Sigs would take up a significant portion of the page.

I think it just made more sense to make a user's username link back to a profile containing their bio rather than appending that bio to the bottom of every post. More economical in terms of space utilization and leads to higher signal-to-noise ratio in the thread.

I think honestly you couldn't make people happy

If people hated sigs, you needed restrictions so they didn't get out of hand

Those restrictions were usually hated by people who liked sigs

and overall it was a distracting feature from the main purpose.

They were ever in favour?

I still have my Geek Code saved somewhere. Probably on a floppy disk. 😂

Specialized forums still have them, like if you are on ASpecificOldTruck.com forum thing. but I personally find them annoying.

At some point the signatures were regularly larger than the actual posts and they became a laughing stock. Also they often contain information that only the signature's owner cares about - if he even keeps it up to date.

Images: No idea.

Text: Still prevalent in forums among AAR authors. The only such forum I know of is paradoxplaza, but AARs would probably also work for games in the Civilization series.

The better forums would only show the first post from a user having their signature, and any other posts by them on that thread it would be absent. That's the biggest problem with such things, they end up cluttering the actual discussion.

Ahh, the good old days of making different userbars. I think that's actually how I got started learning programs like gimp and photoshop lol

Anyway, it probably changed when social media took off. Preferences shifted and they fell out of style. I didn't mind smaller signatures with a few userbars and stuff, but they did sometimes get crazy if there weren't image size limits or limits of the amount of pics allowed in a signature.

They are awesome. Having a collection of 100 of those little bars, was awesome.

https://i.imgur.com/D0HZzBX.png

I guess I'm the weirdo because I liked them. So long as they had size limits.