Signature

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A signature (also known as a sig or siggy/siggie) is a piece of text placed at the bottom of a forum post each time a particular user contributes. It is a way of customising one's posting personality: people commonly include jokes, song lyrics, quotations from famous people or other NSers, or links to other threads or websites.

Signatures in NS

Many NS posters use signatures, whether to advertise their achievements within the game, remember amusing anecdotes, or honour passed friends. Certain trends are identifiable within particular groups, although thse by no means constitute 'laws':

  • Roleplayers will often link to their current RPs, to attract involvement in Open ones and comments on those that are Closed. They might also link to threads or forums of in-game alliances of which they are members, advertise storefronts, or announce economic or DefCon status.
  • Gameplayers necessarily use the forums less, and may have less call for signatures. Even so, they might advertise their region; defenders sometimes link to alliances they are members of, whilst invaders record the number of regions they have successfully invaded.
  • UN debaters will commonly note any resolutions or repeals they have authored, any intra-UN organizations they are members of, and any authority they might have, such as being delegate for their region or involved in their regional UN office. They might also use their signature to note details about the character they use to RP in debates, usually their ambassador.
  • Generalites tend to have the most varied and inventive signatures, although there are exceptions to this rule on both sides. Given the comparatively shorter lifespan of many General threads, these are less often advertised; the use of quotations or links that back up a debater's political views are far more common. Jokes or humorous posts are also to be found in many Generalite signatures.
  • Moderators sometimes include links to rules threads such as the One Stop Rules Thread in their signatures. Moderators also often use manual signatures when posting in an official capacity.
  • Sports roleplayers will often include their Sporting honours in signatures: 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishes at tournaments such as the World Cup, Under-21 World Cup, Cherry Cup, as well as any major tournament hosting duties the nation may have undertaken are often included.

Rules

Note: NSwiki is an unofficial resource. Contributors to this page include non-mods, and mods who do edit this page may not be doing so in an official capacity. Rules are stated here for the purpose of interest, and not as statement of official policy. Posters should consult the One Stop Rules Shop or approach the Mods in the Moderation forum if in doubt as to the legality of their or other posters' signatures.

As with all posted material in NS, signatures are subject to rules. Most are fairly obvious: signatures should not deliberately offend other posters, troll, contain forbidden links to offensive sites or promote illegal activity. Regional advertising in sigs is permitted.

Additionally, signatures may not exceed 8 lines. Use of Jolt's 'quote' function generally produces a block of text considered to be at least 4 lines long, depending on the length of quoted text. The use of excessively large fonts is also frowned upon. The rationale for this is simple netiquette: large signatures tend to disrupt threads by dwarfing small posts, and forcing users to scroll needlessly.

Jolt prohibits the use of images in signatures: vB code '[img]' tags do not work. This prevents the posting of obscene or simply very large images. Many off-site NS forums do allow images in signatures: these include the UNO forums, where small buttons designed by Freedonia denote membership of committees such as The Pretenama Panel, or the Lineart forum, where some users advertise their nations and storefronts with inventive graphics.

The forums prior to the move to Jolt did not allow use of signatures.

Trends

For all that signatures allow individuality for posters, there are noticeable trends among posters in their chosen motifs. Many of these are not exclusive to NS, but in fact part of larger internet in-jokes.

98%

'98% of the teenage population does or has tried smoking pot. If you're one of the 2% who hasn't, copy & paste this in your signature.'

This statistic, the truth of which is highly dubious, was once commonly quoted by the (significantly more than 2%) of posters who had not or claimed to have not smoked marijuana. It did not take long for a number of parodies to catch on. The most enduring of these was based on the suggestion, originally posted in an NS context in the signature of The Most Glorious Hack, that if one wanted to boast of having not done something, invading Chechnya was a far more impressive non-accomplishment. Presently several posters have signatures based on or parodying the 'I have not invaded Chechnya' claim.

Rabbit

(\_/)
(O.o)
(> <)

This ASCII art rabbit is copied into sigs, in the hope that should word spread sufficiently, world domination will be achieved. Some believe this is unlikely.

Farewells

Popular posters or NSers are sometimes honoured in sigs after they leave the game. Examples include:

  • After the deletion of Hogsweat for griefing, those who felt he had been unfairly treated added 'RIP Hogsweat '03 - '05. Unjustly deleted.' or words to that effect to their sig. This prompted 'reprisal sigs' from those who supported the deletion. Those who preferred to remain neutral sometimes merely noted 'RIP Hogsweat '03 - '05.' Several other posters threatened to leave at the time, and although many reneged on this promise, they too found themselves 'honoured' in several posters' sigs.
  • UN forum posters, notably members of the Old Guard, who contend that Vastiva's deletion was unfair, have been known to include the line 'Vastiva is innocent' in their sigs.
  • After DemonLordEnigma left the game, rumours of her return using a puppet prompted those wishing to escape or satirise speculation to include 'I am not DLE' in their sigs. After it was alleged that the player behind DLE died, this trend diminished in popularity.

Manual signatures

Signatures are automatically added to each post. However, some posters prefer to use 'manual signatures' in order to retain a degree of flexibility, without having to constantly toggle Jolt options. The use of manual sigs is especially prevalent in the UN forum, to distinguish between IC and OOC remarks. Moderators often use manual signatures to distinguish between their posts as players and their posts as game officials.

The use of manual signatures is considered discourteous by some. There is an option to 'turn off' sigs, but users with this option will still be forced to view manual signatures.