Thursday, August 26, 2010

Cut the quotes, please

Why do some people find it necessary to put some irrelevant quote after their signature in forum and mailing list postings? When you see posts from these people several times a day it becomes incredibly irritating.

One person whose posts I seem to encounter frequently has two quotes after his signature: "Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door!" and "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."

I can't say I ever found the first one very funny but it has got very old after the 100th viewing. And I didn't join a ham radio mailing list to learn about people's political opinions, whether or not I agree with them. So please, just stop doing it.

5 comments:

  1. Hi Julian, I fully agree with you. 73 Paul

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  2. Julian, as you will know, I am one of those people that adds a random quote at the end of most of my mails.

    I have had comments about this from a number of lists, and I have asked for peoples feedback on whether I should or should not continue with the comments.
    In all of the lists except for UK-Contest the majority was to continue, with comments along the lines of it being a lift for thier day, just entertaining and why not!

    So I will continue to do so, except for UK-Contest, where I try to remember to remove the quote.

    Personally, I'm ok with it and enjoy other peoples quotes too.
    I guess it's horses for courses and there is always the delete button.

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  3. Hi David. One of the things that makes quotes so annoying is seeing the same thing several times a day so a random quote, depending on the content and the number of variations, is not as bad as a static one.

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  4. it's random (although I think the algorithm may be sentient) 1 out of 200+ and that number grows each time I see a good quote. And I try pick short ones.

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  5. Julian,

    My MUA allows me to zap the "signature file" which is of course a carryover from the earliest days of the Internet. But my only real beef with long sigs is when they exceed the length of the email. One guy on a QRP list has an eleven line signature file, complete with an ASCII image, and his list postings often say little more than, "yeah, I agree"...

    I would (quietly cheer) if his PC failed and he lost all his data including that signature file! :-)

    73 de Jeff

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