What happened to the signatures? I see no more signatures on the site, including my own. I have the setting enabled. I just tried to change it and it said no more than 300 characters, why? It was already over 300 characters before. Or does it not count formatting and urls?

Hi, Pideli. Cute moniker you've picked for it.

The signatures are indeed not showing, sitewide. it's not clear if/when they're coming back; admins felt that they were too often being used for spammy reasons.

However, information formerly shown in signatures is still available when viewing member profiles. So even though that info is no longer as quickly accessible, it's not lost either.

Wouldn't it be better just to ask/change the signatures of the members who abuse it, instead of removing the option for everyone?

It's not a case of one or two - we already would remove those. It's more a general check of all signatures, their usage, and an examination of the available fields in the profile, combined with the fact that signatures are only valid for forum posters.

In essence, the vast majority of things that could be said in a signature (and thus shown on every post) can already be added to the profile. It's better to have people read the content of posts rather than signatures after all.

Signatures still show up on the profile pages so can still be used for helpful links etc.

Thank you! I hate reading half way through a huge long signature before realising it is in fact the signature - and I never seem to learn! And considering the original purpose of a signature is to show who posted the message or letter, we don't need them at all since we are identified already in the side panel.

Hmpff, I liked being able to easily promote my sims stuff, and I didn't mind others doing it. More people are going to see it in the signature than on the profile. You can easily see what is the signature and what is the post because the signature has smaller letters.

And I haven't figured out how to edit my profile... >.<

Editing your profile can be done by clicking the gray button marked "Edit my Profile". That button shows on your main profile page (the one you get to by clicking "View Profile") whenever you are logged in. It's slim and appears well off to the right, under the line with the option to "Send private message" (to yourself, heh) and above the line whose rightmost tab is "Favourite Downloads".

However, editing the text of your signature is done separately, not through that button. I mention this because editing the signature is still the way to customize the personalizable text that shows on your main profile page.

How you reach the place where you edit your signature isn't much different now. Still, I'll describe it here because it can be difficult to find and others reading this thread may want to know as well:
1) Go to your User Control Panel (click on your avatar at the top-right of the navbar, so upper-right corner of the screen; if you have no avatar uploaded, it's a simple head-and-shoulders icon).
2) Once you're at your UCP, the Control Panel Menu is shown across a white background. Find the Settings & Options drop-down menu.
3) On that drop-down menu, scroll down and click Edit Signature. And there you go!

Pideli,

Don't forget, as a Creator you also have access to the "About Me / Policy / Other Text" which appears as a large box on the profile page, so you can fill out lots more information there. (You can get there by clicking your avatar in the top right and clicking Edit Profile).

Most people don't read profiles. And I was updating the sig to show links to a photo journal

I hope that the signatures will be brought back, as users can already just turn off viewing them.

Aha thanks guys, I didn't realize that ridiculously small box was for putting information on your profile.

And I agree with @JDacapo , since people can turn off viewing signatures if they're bothered by them, I don't see why it's necessary to remove them altogether.

Nor do I see why they had to completely change the format of this site and disable signatures without so much as a warning. Maybe something posted on all pages at the top for a week or so BEFORE it happened? Oh wait... wouldn't be as much fun, would it?

Well... my only reason for missing signatures is, certain people who had archived other sims creations that would otherwise be lost were in their signatures. I find the "search member" tool to be quite difficult to use successfully, if i can't remember the exact spelling of someone's name. But if i knew they posted a lot in a certain area, i could find them... their signature with the link told me I'd found the right person.

Plus... many times I didn't know a person had (or might have) an archive. Their signature was the only way I found that out and how to access it. With the rate at which stuff is disappearing, it was helpful to be reading a post in the forum and spot "Sims Wardrobe stuff here!" or "Looking for Raynuss's creations?" or "Chris Hatch Family Friendly Archive!". Stuff i might not have even known was missing til I needed it or saw it in someone's signature.

To me, that was the value of sigs... I never used them myself, but advertising lost websites was a real bonus!


-grinEvilly
>=)

Yeah, I have never mistaken a signature for part of a post. Bring 'em back I say!!

I liked that people had Signatures and I had a Signature, I am sure that mine did not violate any rule as to length and I am pretty sure that people would not say that it was a Spammy sort of Signature.

I plead for the return of Signatures.

Yeah! There are people like Smorbie1 who have linked to archives of dead Sims 2 sites! Why did you have to remove them, and without even giving everyone a heads-up? Did you just want to see how we'd all react?

Signatures still exist . You can still see the signatures in the user profiles, so I don’t see the issue here. It’s not like they are gone completely since you can still read them there, so in the case above where you know the username then just... click on the profile. As for identifying people by signature, you can also use.... the username and the avatar to do that. Neither of which have changed

As for “changing the site without warming” - it happens all the time, all over the web. Websites constantly evolve and change, and there will always be a vocal minority who want the old ways, but the navigation here changed for a reason, which was to consolidate the menus, and make it easier for the vast majority of people to find and get to parts of the site relevant to the particular game they play. There are always reasons behind the changes, and it’s not just to see how people react.

At this point, i’d be fine with keeping signatures disabled by default and allowing people to turn them back on specifically. So then all you guys can still see signatures, just that most people wouldn’t.

Also! (A sudden break from our sponsors! :P) For the folks that really like to be aware of changes on the site and even give feedback on it before it's going live, you guys can always join the Beta testers program .

Beta testers would be the first ones who would give feedback on such things like navbar changes, big changes on specific pages (remember how the infobox on downloads used to be in the footer?) and even the site redesign that's slowly happening.

I still think we need to make a proper thread about it but if you're interested just let us know!

No! Keep 'em banned :P

I can see where a change of this sort might make sense if most of the signatures here were like the ones on other forums that I've visited - i.e. primarily personal statements of the sort one might see on a bumper sticker. Here at MTS, though, (at least in the TS2 section) I've seen many signatures that contain useful or helpful links like lordtyger9's helpful information for MacIntosh users, Smorbie's links to Chris Hatch's family-friendly mods, my own instructions for using christianlov's CPack Editor, and Bulbizarre's collections of the contents of three defunct TS2 modding sites. Hiding this sort of signature just ends up hiding information that a visitor might find useful.

I also don't see what was wrong with the way signatures worked before. People who didn't like them could always just disable them as JDacapo noted above.

Placing links to old sites and content is best listed in one place, rather than being in multiple users signatures. Placing links in signatures is not exactly the most efficient way to go about listing links for old sites. One dedicated forum would be far more beneficial, such as using Social Groups. This way if anyone wants to see where the old content is these days, they can go join the group.

I don't get the resistance when it comes to the signatures... are they the new evil or something? Was there something we all missed?

The signatures here are very non-intrusive compared to other sites. Smaller font, no flashy gifs, nice little line letting you know that it was separate from the rest of the post.. but ok, not my site and we can all agree to disagree on this I reckon.

I dont' think they are evil but they may be seen as unnecessary and confusing data when trying to convey a message/meaning in a post.

Joining groups to look for old content might seem more efficient, but it isn't the way most people on this site do it. We want our signatures back!

The issue is that way more people are going to see the signatures on the forum than on the profiles. Not everyone visits everyone's profiles. So whatever you wanted to share in your signature is going to be shared with way less people now.


How do you know it's a minority? Was there a poll I missed?

You can do what you want with your site obviously, but don't act like this is what people wanted because a lot of us used signatures and I haven't seen a bunch of people bitching about them. :/

This comes at a really crappy time because I wanted to inform people that all of my sims pictures are going to disappear because of tinypic, so if they want to read my stuff on MTS now would be the time...


But why?
Still sad... :/

Vocal minority? I think it was a minority of people who wanted to remove the signatures. In fact, I think the only reason they were removed is because a couple of admins didn't like them. To hell with what the rest of us want.