At the bottom of virtually every post is the greatest man made creation since the Lazy-Boy chair: The Signature. This beauty oddly enough prevents you from having to sign your freaking name to every single post you create.

In this article, I am going to cover the basics of how you create your signature and more importantly; how not to create it.

What? All this so you don't have to type 'Bob' after every post?

Your signature is far more than just a way to display your name. For example, lets take a look at mine (well, what it looked like at the time I wrote this):


Here I have my standard signature, a favorite quote, and several links. These are links that I put in in order to act as quick access points for those that might be viewing my post. You can see that I have links to my profile, my articles, my tutorials, and the FAQ (frequently asked questions about how to use the site - we have all looked at that now haven't we? ).

How do I make or change my signature then?

I am so chuffin happy that you asked. All you need to do is make sure that you are logged in and then click Quick Links->Edit Signature. There you will see a message editor that will allow you to create a signature just as if you were creating a post.

"Woohoo! Im going to add 500 smilies, a picture of my cat, as well as my life story!"


Woah there antsy pants. Here is the bit where I get to tell you how not to create a signature.

• Do not Have more that 1 image (and no more than 3 or 4 smilies). Images take time (and bandwidth) to download. Those on 56k modems will have a birthday waiting for your signature to download if it is too large. Smilies are a slight exception and I wont overly enforce it unless you go to town on them. Smilies still take up bandwidth - but more importantly they take up processing time (It takes a little work to translate all your smiles). Signatures with excessive smilies will be frowned upon (like this-> )
• Do not make a post sized signature. What I mean by this is that your signature should be no higher than about 4 lines. A good gage for size is to look at my signature. Don't make it larger than mine otherwise members will be confused trying to separate what is a post and what is a signature.
• Do not go to town with font sizes and colours. Doing this is just as processor intensive as doing this: It is also kind of annoying and it makes you look like you don't get out much (Like me).

Couple of other points to keep in mind:

• If you do not have a signature, nothing will appear at the bottom of your posts. When you do finally get around to making one - they will start to appear from that moment forward.
• Remember that when you change your signature, it updates the signatures in all of your signed posts.
• Signatures are not a place to advertise. Promotional verbiage in off-site links will be treated the same as spamming.

nJoy