🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2004-08-04, Francois <NOSPAMfrancois@primedirectiveonline.comNOSPAM> wrote:
> Recieved from Mark Morrison on 4/8/2004 10:07 AM:
>
>> just his annoying sig
>> kept pissing me off.
>
> Now that would be a nice feature: sig blocking.

Some newsreaders implement it :-)

The convention is to denote a .sig with "-- " on a line - the space 
being seen as important, so it doesn't get triggered by a bit of ascii 
art or the like - and many newsreaders will display this in a different 
colour, or have a setting flag somewhere to not show it, or (in the case 
of slrn, which I'm using now) automatically strip it out of replies.

One of the reasons this has fallen into disuse is a) that people often 
don't know how it works and b) many newsreaders only partially support 
it; Outlook Express, for example, automatically strips trailing spaces 
on lines, *after* it's been queued to send - you can't override it - 
with the effect that "[dash][dash][space][newline]" becomes 
"[dash][dash][newline]", which doesn't trigger the simple filter looking 
for the signature break. [There's an aftermarket patch for this - 
OEQuotefix, I think it's called - but that involves someone knowing 
enough to actively try to solve the problem]

-- 
-Andrew Gray
 andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk