Really, I fucking hate them.
Yah… they usually belong to people with obnoxiously large egos.
Unfortunately, they suck up system resources worse than the korg legacy collection.
I agree completely. Put your signature in spoilers with a warning if you have to have it overly large.
That just makes it larger…
What are large signatures?
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.[5] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George’s Day.[6] This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar’s mistake, has proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616.[7] He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.[8]
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was educated at the King’s New School in Stratford,[9] a free school chartered in 1553,[10] about a quarter of a mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England,[11] and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.[12]
John Shakespeare’s house, believed to be Shakespeare’s birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway’s neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage.[13] The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times.[14] Anne’s pregnancy could have been the reason for this. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, who was baptised on 26 May 1583.[15] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised on 2 February 1585.[16] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August 1596.[17]
After the birth of the twins, there are few historical traces of Shakespeare until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. Because of this gap, scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare’s “lost years”.[18] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching.[19] Another eighteenth-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[20] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[21] Some twentieth-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain “William Shakeshafte” in his will.[22] No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death.[23]
London and theatrical career
It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.[24] He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene:
…there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.[25]
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,[26] but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself.[27] The italicised phrase parodying the line “Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3, along with the pun “Shake-scene”, identifies Shakespeare as Greene’s target.[28]
"All the world’s a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts…"
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42.[29]
Greene’s attack is the first recorded mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks.[30] From 1594, Shakespeare’s plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.[31] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King’s Men.[32]
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare’s property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.[33] In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.[34]
Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.[35] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603).[36] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.[37] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of “the Principal Actors in all these Plays”, some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain what roles he played.[38] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that “good Will” played “kingly” roles.[39] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father.[40] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V,[41] though scholars doubt the sources of the information.[42]
Shakespeare’s funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.[43] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[44] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul’s Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies’ wigs and other headgear.[45]
Later years and death
After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.[46] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[47] who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.[48]
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death;[49] but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time,[50] and Shakespeare continued to visit London.[51] In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary.[52] In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the Blackfriars priory;[53] and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.[54]
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616[55] and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,[56] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.[57]
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna.[58] The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to “the first son of her body”.[59] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.[60] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.[61] Shakespeare’s will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her “my second best bed”, a bequest that has led to much speculation.[62] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[63]
Shakespeare’s grave.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.[64] The stone slab covering his grave is inscribed with a curse against moving his bones:
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
Sometime before 1623, a monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[65] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[66]
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
On the other hand, it doesn’t load with the page, saving you precious time.
if you use Firefox, ADBlock is your friend
Damn I was just thinking about putting a youtube video and flash mp3 players with all my song in my sigh.
Like that’s even a solution … lets prevent ourselves from seeing flash ANYWHERE, shall we?
epic facepalm
Actually, if you use Adblock Plus then it’s not simply a matter of blocking everything or nothing at all. It allows you to add very flexible filters so you can block specific pieces of content from specific locations. See the following documentation: http://adblockplus.org/en/filters
Setting it up to block embedded content in sigs such as images and flash players is really quite trivial.
.
Alright, but still, what if we LIKE watching youtube videos? … in fact, I may want to see the specific video that’s in someone’s signature, I just don’t want to see it in the forums.
Easy as pie.
|http://youtube.com/*$domain=renoise.com
or
|http://vimeo.com/*$domain=renoise.com
etc.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmpie
But wait, there’s moar… what about videos that are legitimately posted, and not inside signatures! 
you can even filter a single specific youtube video out. It’s quite surprising that you believed I am so stupid that I would filter out the entire youtube just because of a signature, while you even didn’t bother to look at the basics of ADBlock. There is also another more targeted alternative which is called RemoveItPermanently, you may check it out in case you will remove the palm from your face someday.
On the subject of adblock proxies, I have (and would) used http://www.privoxy.org/
Still, I think some common decency is warranted here.
I’m not making any claims about the people who participate in this behavior, that was someone else, but the whole concept of mega sigs is really fucking obnoxious.
I’m here to read the forums, not to get flyers/spam/socialnetwork pushed in my face like a bad “loose weight fast, ask me how” informercial.
If i’m interested in things you are doing OUTSIDE the forums, i’ll click on your website link.
Making the assumption that I would be interested, repeatedly, with every post, is in horrible taste.
Subtlety and style please.
as an example of good will, I will reduce my text-only signature
Then you would probably have to look at the HTML element hiding features instead.
renoise.com##div.signature > embed
I haven’t been able to do extensive testing yet, but this filter would hide any tags found within
blocks found on pages within the renoise.com domain. Embedded content which is NOT within the signature block, ie. within the main post, should hopefully be untouched.
Update: Yep. Just tested it myself. Seems to work ok.
.
hi, what’s up?
I guess I need a larger sig, with music.
mine just doubled.
just wait until i start putting religious zealot type stuff in it! HA! 
Ante-up, enjoy oblivion.
