Rules of the Forums

[RON@HQ]

Howie... I appreciate your attempts to get around this, but it all comes down to text strings and even your partial strings will still be picked up by the search engine.

[Markus_ls]

Other boards don't have that search engine problem. Maybe find out what they do?

I just checked the other website forum and I think Howie is right, it doesn't seem to check the signatures when doing a search? (I had thought it did but doesn't seem to now that I specifically tested.)

Of course, the software here is much better, especially for composing/editing.....but it IS interesting and makes me wonder how their engine works.

[thfenn]

Markus, it would appear you broke 2,000 postings today in this thread, in, it would appear, less than one year. Nick, I think your accomplishment's already been noted elsewhere, but if not, congrats there too. And helloneumn, you're getting awful close. I am in awe, at both the totals and respective paces, as I won't see numbers like that for another decade or so at this rate.

[Markus_ls]

Markus, it would appear you broke 2,000 postings today in this thread, in, it would appear, less than one year. Nick, I think your accomplishment's already been noted elsewhere, but if not, congrats there too. And helloneumn, you're getting awful close. I am in awe, at both the totals and respective paces, as I won't see numbers like that for another decade or so at this rate.

Thanks....it was a lot better than what I "broke" after that taco festival last week! I knew I was approaching but didn't notice I passed it.....

I thought I would go "quiet" during the offseason. With no baseball to talk what would be the point in posting? But it turns out there are a lot of really great strategy, theory, humor, and hot stove threads around here in the winter so I actually built up most of those totals in Dec/Jan. Go figure.

[Howie M]

Ok, I'll punt the roster in the sig until this gets straightened out...

[bankerboy]

Fun Reading

*lol* I enjoyed this tremendously.

"Just acquired the STL closer for the ARI star SP.
Other star players include the ARI starting C; the best PIT OF; the fastest CHI guy; and the spunky STL SS
Have suffered with that ARI former closer, though. "

Would be humerous to see posts in the Roster Help section like "Need advice regarding the second most injury-prone Cub SP"

[Howie M]

thanks, bankerboy.

I'm not trying to be a d*ck about it; it's more for amusement purposes.

I do think it's a mistake to not allow the signatures (though I'd limit it to one team roster), but I appreciate the fact that there's discussion about it.

I suspect by next season it will be worked out to where they can be listed, with the one-roster limitation for brevity's sake.

I'm always intrigued to see a knowledgeable comment, then see if the poster owns that guy.

[GoldenEagle]

Re: Rosters in Signatures

I'm actually thankful that the search function has called attention to the issue of "roster in signature" proliferation. Just my humble opinion, but repeating an entire roster on every post really clutters up the boards. I've spent time on multiple sites, and having to scroll past some guy's roster (especially 2-3-4 teams' worth) just to see a single comment starts to wear on my eyes. It's particularly acute on Mastersball.com, even with tiny type fonts in use.

Since most "roster in signature" advocates end up spending a few minutes formatting the font, spacing, line breaks, color, etc. ANYWAY, my suggestion would be for them to cut/paste the formatted rosters into a simple Word.doc and save it.

Leave the default signature "sans roster". In the 90% of cases where the roster is not relevant to the post, then the boards stay far less cluttered and the search engine doesn't get saturated.

When the post is a specific question about a trade, category help, free agent pickup, etc. where the existing roster IS relevant to the post, then simply copy/paste the roster from the Word.doc file back to that post (not to the signature). If the post is just about pitching, then all you have to include is your pitching roster. Or if the post is just about "one team's" (if you have multiple teams) potential transaction or player evaluation, then just that "one team's" roster need be included.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

[bankerboy]

If teams are allowed back into signature lines, then there would definitely need to be some format restrictions. GE, I agree it's tedious to see list in the signature like this :

C -
C -
1B -

etc, et cetc,

However, I'm less opposed to those like this :

C- V. Mart, C - J. Willingham, 1B - P. Konerko etc etc


Of course, then how is enforcing down?

[Biff Pocoroba]

Just FYI, I run a few messageboards. I could be wrong, as I have not worked with VBulletin recently, but if it's anything at all like old VBulletin or any other messageboard software out there, signature lines are excluded from database searches.

When you do a search, it searches the table that has message contents in it. The sigs are stored in an entirely different table, and it is linked to the user NOT to the message table.

VBulletin actually doesn't know beforehand which post is linked to what signature. Which is why if you change your sig, ALL your posts get converted to the new signature. It does the join between tables dynamically when it displays a thread page. Do a search for "Marvin Miller" and select "show results as post" and you'll see you won't get any false positives. Try "a thousand steps","pretty good", etc.