[Worldwalker]

It's the tragedy of the commons.

With no formal/technical restriction on signature size, the people who use larger and more intrusive marketing .sigs have an edge over the people who follow the social conventions and respect other users. (it's a bit like how when supermarkets don't kick the people with full carts out of the express checkout lines, it's the rule-breakers who gain the advantage over the rule-followers) So more of them do it. Then it becomes an arms race for having the biggest/flashiest/most-totally-annoying graphic .sig.

There really needs to be either a technical limitation on this (some forum software can set a hard limit to the x/y dimensions of .sig images; I don't know if MR's can) or a very hard and fast rule, one giving specific dimensions, not just "overly large" or something, that is enforced -- first by a warning, and then by loss of .sig privileges.

If this goes on ... well, take a look at some of the gaming forums and you'll see our future. They're advertising the size of their e-peens, not their books for sale, but it's the same concept. You'll see three-line posts followed by a dozen or more banners proclaiming the merits of their characters in every MMO they play, their ranking on every ladder, even the music they're currently listening to. A "page" of posts there can be three or four posts, with all the rest being their freaking bloated sigs.

The primary purpose of MobileRead is a place for people to discuss ebooks, not a captive audience to sell them to. Unrestricted advertising .sigs risks leading to a lot of "I agree" posts just to display that .sig, and shifting the focus from discussion to marketing -- something which will, in time, kill the forum. Even if all the oversized .sigs were pictures of puppies, though, the same problem occurs: more scrolling, and more paging, to extract the pearls of content from the sea of .sigs. MR, like any forum, already expends a part of each post's real estate on non-content material: the left column, buttons, dividers, people who quote to excess, whatever. The bigger the .sigs (graphic or otherwise), the worse the content-to-other-stuff ratio becomes. And we're reading for the content; no matter how cute the puppy, or how impressive the e-peen -- or how interesting the book covers -- you only need to see that once. It eats content.

A somewhat more complicated option, and one that again I'm not sure if the MR software supports, would be to allow graphic .sigs only in certain forums -- in this case, specifically the proposed Book Fair forum. That would be the designated MR "bookstore", the place where we go looking for interesting new books to buy, so the major focus would be on book announcements, and discussion would be a secondary (though still valid) purpose, the reverse of the regular forums. We'd want books in .sigs there -- kind of the equivalent of looking at adjacent books on the shelves. (something else that's lethal to my book-buying budget) But in the discussion forums, the focus should be on discussion, not on the products someone has for sale.

I've run forums since the BBS days. I learned the hard way that forum problems are much, much easier to handle when they're small. Deal with a problem when only a few people are doing it -- oversized .sigs, for instance -- and there might be some griping by those few, but it dies down quickly. Wait until a problem has gotten bigger and more entrenched, when the problem behavior has become common and tolerated, and the reaction is much louder, longer, and more intense, and pulls in people who are not directly involved.

MobileRead is getting huge. The bigger a community gets, the less of an effect peer pressure, shared values, and personal connections will have, and the greater the chance of having community members who no sense of community, or no commitment to it. MR isn't a small town anymore; it would be the second-largest city in my home state.

This post is getting all sorts of long and sociological. The executive summary: there really has to be some kind of a hard limit on .sigs before things get out of hand.