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Posted by: X 10000 Fists X
Remember the Chuck Norris fad?
That swept the internet. Now it's pretty much over. This will eventually follow the same path, just to be replaced by something just as annoying, in it's own way.
Nah, I don't think so. For those of you old enough to remember BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) that you had to dial into before the internet was around (seriously! ...queue the eery music), you can help me confirm that this is where this trend started. Back then, bulletin boards were not much different than the b.net forums are today, except that there were no avatars and many forums were anonymous. If you look at the craigslist forums today, you will see a similar forum to the kind of thing I am talking about. All posts are anonymous and thus many people give their posts a unique "signature" for self-identification.
I remember when I first started logging onto BBSs in about 1990 or 1991, I found a BBS named "Access Denied" located in Alexandria, Virginia. It was an anonymous BBS, like craigslist, meaning that you never knew who was posting unless they had a signature. One person had a signature that was a complete poem (one of the shorter poems ever written), and every one of his or her posts ended with:--The problem with a kitten is that, eventually, it becomes a cat.Definitely a much more clever "signature" than some, but as you can see, people have been trying to implement their own unique signatures at the bottoms of posts for at least the last 15 years or so. I do not think that this trend is going anywhere, despite the fact that it is now obsolete and redundant.
Perhaps it's because I've been seeing this kind of thing around the internet (and BBSs) for so long, but I don't mind it. I do roll my eyes when I see the more ridiculous signatures, but like pretty much everyone else has said, I find them easy to ignore.
At any rate, just thought that I'd contribute a little bit about the history of these "personal signatures" so that you guys don't get scared that it is becoming some kind of a new escalating trend and that soon every post will end with some ridiculous catchphrase. The best advice I can give is to just ignore it if it tends to bother you, because I don't think that they're going anywhere.
*The problem with a kitten is that, eventually, it becomes a cat.*
[Edited on 04.09.2007 7:06 AM PDT]