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Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remembers the forum sig subculture from the early 00s? (sig as in signature)

This was where I found my passion for graphic design. Making signatures and userbars in a cracked version of Photoshop started me on a journey that included me getting my degree in GD, working for major international clients, starting my own business, returning to an inhouse position, and then leaving the field after 5 years to get paid 25% more as an entry-level web dev with no relevant qualifications.

I place this to the mid-90s at least, probably from Usenet. I adhered strictly to the rules, which were:

- Begin signature with -- following be a space and carriage return

- Have up to four lines of text following that

- Figlet/ASCII art was allowed

I don't recall what imagery I had, but a few different lines that I had for a long while were:

- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my pants the most.

- In the beginning was nothing, which exploded.

- I beat the Internet. The last boss is really hard.

In a Usenet sigs, it wasn't unusual to see a phone number, DoD number, or a statement that one is speaking only personally and not for their employer. More than one person had "ICBM coordinates" in their sig.

It was a different time.

One thing I'm glad has gone away is signatures that include a quote from someone famous (or net.famous), along with attribution. I'd skim a post, see the name of a person at the bottom, and associate that identity with that name, sometimes more than the name of the poster. At one point I was doing email and Usenet in Emacs, I wrote a feature to deemphasize sigs: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sigbegone/

The sig community contributed heavily toward my career path. I learned a ton of things due to sigs from hosting and developing plugins for PHP forums, web design, working with relatively advanced Photoshop techniques, basics of various 3D modeling applications, etc. I still have some of my old sigs somewhere and they're pretty awesome little artifacts from my youth.

I look back very fondly on this era. In retrospect, it seems like the internet was a much more optimistic, much less cynical place.

On a similar note, does anyone else find that new forum software UIs aren't nearly as nice and easy to navigate as the forum software of the early 2000s?

I find HN to be quite easily navigable.

old.reddit.com and HN are the two best Web forum UIs that I'm familiar with. (threading, scoring, putting message over writer, and minimizing cruft).

(Though I used to have much more powerful tools for Usenet and email.)

I definitely consider Hacker News to be designed in the style of the old internet.

By new forum software, do you mean Discourse? Like: https://forum.openwrt.org/

It took some getting used to but now I'm actually starting to prefer it to phpbb esque forums. Apart from the terrible space utilization that is.

I remember having to impose a height limit on the forums I helped run.

I hated it on traditional forums, where it inevitably got to the point where the comment was "meh, i dunno" and then the person's signature was 150px high, and the forum engine only display 10 of these at a time. Minimal interfaces with quality indicators like Hacker News or old Reddit are so much more useful, and the sub-threads are much more visible because of the tree structure.

I learned photoshop for the first time to make signatures for my forum buddies, little did I know I was setting the path of my entire life...

There was an earlier ascii sig subculture on Usenet.

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