another nice one

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <1338 at sas.UUCP> jwd at sas.UUCP (John W. DeBoskey) writes:
>   However: The last 10 articles I've perused had .sigs varing
>            from 4 to 11 lines. His is the smallest so far.

  According to "netiquette", anything above four lines is probably
inappropriate except in extreme situations.  That's why many news
posting interfaces reject everything after the fourth line of a
.signature file.

  Also, signatures are supposed to contain useful information.  Three
lines of @'s is not useful information.  Therefore, if all he really
needs to put into his signature is his username and address, he should
have a one-line signature, with about twenty characters in it.  THAT
would be an acceptable signature.  My point is that the question isn't
whether his signature is wasteful or not compared to other signatures,
but rather whether his signature is wasteful *in and of itself*.

  However, quite frankly, I'd rather see 11 lines of useful
information than 4 lines of @'s.

>   Now think: News is compressed. How much bandwith is required to send
>              a continuous stream of '@' chars, a few bytes of text,
>              and then more '@' chars. Please include the 3 cr's
>              also. I leave this as a problem to the reader. It costs
>              less then sending the average 5 line sig with no repeating
>              characters.

  Not ALL news is compressed.  As much as we don't like to admit (and
as much as we are trying to change it), there are still sites out
there that get their news unbatched and/or uncompressed.

  Furthermore, one place where news is *not* compressed is when the
reader is viewing it.  Ideally, an 11-line signature with lots of
blank space in it (in the best case, represented as tab characters)
will sometimes be transmitted across a tty line faster than a 4-line @
signature.  A 4-line normal signature containing useful information
will definitely be transferred faster than the @ signature.  I'm not
sure where the line can be drawn, but I'd say you can get away with a
lot longer signature (in terms of lines) for the same transportation
costs (in terms of the time it takes it to be sent to the user's
terminal) if the signature has lots of blank space, which is usually
the case when it represents useful information.

  And finally, I just don't like seeing three solid lines of @ in a
posting.  It hurts my eyes.  It is abrasive.  It is annoying.  Just my
opinion, of course, but apparently an opinion shared by many people on
the net.

>   Personally I think the guy has a bad attitude for MAYBE 1 of the
>   postings he has made. So what is my opinion. But flaming him
>   for a .sig is just plain silly in my viewpoint. It shows some
>   people aren't thinking when they let their fingers do the
>   typing(aka: disconnect brain, start typing).

  Or that "some people" have read and understood the rules of
netiquette and understand that signatures are supposed to contain
useful information and useful information only.  This is not a hard
and fast rule that can never even possibly be broken (e.g. Peter da
Silva's (sp?) signature with the little drawing in it is probably OK),
but a signature containing three lines of @ almost definitely crosses
the line.

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
MIT Project Athena				11 Ashford Terrace
jik at Athena.MIT.EDU				Allston, MA  02134
Office: 617-253-8495			      Home: 617-782-0710