.sig (signature block)

Synonyms:
See also:	Fannish Address Labels, Icon
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A .sig (short for "signature block") is a personalized block of text set to be automatically added at the bottom of a fan's email messages, Usenet articles, or forum posts.

A .sig can contain the fan's name, their fannish affiliations, political and personal statements, in-jokes and shout-outs, keeper duties, and quotes.

In 1993, the president of SEFEB suggested: "What say we all just put it in our .sigs so we can identify ourselves?"

.sigs sometimes included ASCII art, something that could lead to discord, as modems and dial-ups meant that space and time was money, and plumping one's messages with lengthy .sigs was poor etiquette. From rec.arts.drwho in the late 1980s: "Trim your sig. file."

.sigs were also a place to promote fan's own websites and other fanworks.

Could Get Heated

Most .sigs were fluffy. In 1996, Susan Garrett vowed to cut her hair (uncut since she was 13 years old) if Forever Knight came back for a fourth season. From her FORKNI-L sig: "When we get a fourth season, the hair GOES."

Sometimes, however, .sigs could cause fan conflict. Early in the history of the ForKNI-L mailing list, its Forever Knight fandom developed a number of Forever Knight Factions. They were generally good-natured divisions, with fans "aligning" behind particular characters (and later, pairings) as their favorites, usually by listing their affiliation in their ".sig"s. At least once in the list's history, though, passions over affiliations were running high enough that the list moderators banned .sig affiliation mentions for a couple of weeks to cool things down and get the list back on topic.

Fans also included personal statements and opinions in their .sigs. Here a .sig from J. Michael Straczynski in 2001:

...SFX is a fairly useless publication on just about every imaginable front. Never have so many jumped-up fanboys done so little, with so much, for so long. - JMS.

.sig Etiquette

Keep it G-rated: [1986]:

From CompuServe's Science Fiction Forum: #: 57397 S2/Star Trek / 06-Feb-86 17:08:07

Sb: #Tribble Bones

Fm: Diane Duane 70137,2260

To: [FB] All:

The results of a phone call to David Gerrold: "Tribbles do not have bones. They have cartilage...Or rather," he said, "they have *one* bone." The requirements of a G-rated Sig make it impossible for me to tell you where that bone *is*. I'm allowed to say that the bone is located somewhere in the area of "the boy part of the tribble."

Is your .sig as promotional fluff, or are you serious?: [1993]:

Are you just interested in having another club name to put in your .sig, or are you interested in participating in an 'email club' which searches out/shares/discusses anything and everything about TGBO (The Great Bald One)?

Don't hog space: [1994]:

Many people pay for either time on-line or the amount of information they download. Full screen pictures of the Liberator, 18 character high pictures of your name, endless cute quotes, etc. cost people money. They also mark you as someone with an inflated sense of his own importance. Try to keep sig files to 7 lines at most, preferably 4 or 5, and never use a sig file that is longer than the text of your message."

.Sigs Themselves as a Creative Work

Question: What would the FK characters' signature lines be? (note: "bullet" is a written out as a word and is a stand-in for an unsupported graphic)

An example of .sig "fiction" is Question: What would the FK characters' signature lines be?, posted at Forever Knight Fan Fiction 2, in which fans envisioned characters from Forever Knight creating their own personal tags.

Some Textual Examples

1991

Therion Calgate

Mountain Confederation

Not a fub, but definitely a wub

Shire of Nithgaard

mea culpa

Prin. of AEthelmearc

Some Visual Examples

These examples are from mid-to-late 1990s, from alt.startrek.creative and alt.tv.x-files.creative. Click on each to enlarge.

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Fan Comments

Unknown Date

A comment on "ritual quoting" on a mailing list:

What's with the quote lists?

Answer: "The ritual quoting, you mean? It's the .sig jihad, where we attempt to grind one another into embarrassed pulp with deliberate quotation." -- Tina C. Actually, it started out as a NatPack thing. Whenever large groups of SunS/NatPackers gather in one place, everything silly/sick/twisted they say tends to get written down and preserved for posterity (and future blackmail purposes). The tendency was extended to cover Buffy episodes, and everything said on-list for SunS, basically.

2000

Comments about FOX's rotten decisions regarding scheduling, marketing, their website, and suing their X-files fans:

Most people I know who frequently read episode transcripts use them to get accurate quotes to put in fanfic or in their sig files, to support an opinion when they're discussing the show, or to (ahem) confirm quotes for a review when they're too lazy to go back and rewatch for the fourth time at 3 in the morning -- not as a substitute for the show itself.

2008

One of the rules about .sigs at Lavender Eyes, a Forgotten Realms archive :

Please keep sig files no more than a few lines long. Do not clutter up the forum with 10-line long sigs, or slow loading images. If the staff feels your sig file is breaking this rule, you will be contacted.