Is it really considered 'Clutter' to be polite here?

Question

I am a Newbie here. In other forums, my habit is to close my messages with the signature

"Kind regards Uwe Hesse

http://uhesse.wordpress.com"

Regarding the automatically attached username, pointing to my profile, I can understand that the part after "Kind regards" is not needed here. Anyway, in my view, there should be no objection against "Kind regards", but some senior members told me that it is just "Clutter".

Is that really common opinion here? Also, I am not very comfortable with the approach that any senior member will edit other members messages regularly according to their preferred style & habits. To me, that seems not appropriate, even a bit rude, to be honest.

I am not sure whether I should participate in such a restricted & cold environment.

Thank you for not editing this message (if you can manage)!

Answer 1

See this discussion for a full explanation of why signatures are discouraged. In short, we want answers to contain only relevant information. Your name, for example, is automatically posted next to every question, answer, or comment you make. You are free and encouraged to put any other info you would want in your signature on your profile instead.

With regards to editing, I understand why you might feel offended that someone else has edited your answer. However, being able to edit any answer is a core part of StackExchange. Just as others may edit your questions and answers to improve them, you may do the same to their submissions.

StackExchange is different from the usual forum setup. Once you familiarize yourself with these differences you'll find that we're a friendly bunch. :)

Answer 2

The word "clutter" is unnecessarily derogatory IMO, so I hope no-one described your tag-line as that and if they did I am sorry - here as anywhere else, politeness is appreciated and actively encouraged. As others have pointed out, this site has a slightly different etiquette than other sites, and politeness is not a concept you can abstract from the culture of the forum you are communicating in - in other words it is more polite not to say "Kind Regards" at the end of your answer on this site!

I believe the reason for this is that the unique focus is on the answer itself, and how it serves anyone reading it (not just the original questioner) - and conciseness is very valuable to someone arriving from Google. This "answer focus" rather then "answerer focus" is also the rationale behind the "wiki-style" free-for-all where your answer may be edited by anyone with high enough reputation (which is not to say it happens all the time).

Whilst it takes a short while to get used to the different culture I think it is well worth the effort - and your excellent contributions so far demonstrate that you have much to contribute as we begin to mature; high quality content, particularly answers, is what makes these sites worthwhile.

I hope you will keep contributing and come to agree with how things are done here (or at least not be offended)

Warm regards :-)

Answer 3

For good or ill it is considered noise to include things like

• Thanks
• Kind Regards

etc. at the foot of every post. If everyone did it, it would make the actual questions and answers hard to spot. It's simpler to say that they shouldn't be added. See the FAQ for more information.

Adding a link to your blog to every post will probably be considered "excessive self promotion" by some people and may well earn you spam flags. Get enough of those on a post and it will be deleted and you'll lose 100 reputation. Again there's more information in the FAQ