How do we bring up questions related to the "rules" of the forum?

Question

What's the appropriate way to do this?

For Example: I understand why we might not want people to do huge sigs and all, but deleting people signing just their name seems a bit draconian. Yes, your user name shows up when you post. But signing your name to your words is basic politeness and manners.

So how do we raise issues around the forum policies and requesting changes?

Thank you, Joel Bancroft-Connors

EDIT- So now that I'm in the right place (thanks to those who pointed the way), I guess I understand a little more the why. Though I'm still not sure I agree. As a broad guideline I can understand why a lot of the topic areas might not need or want anything approaching a signature line. As a professional project manager I know that politeness is one of the key traits of being a good PM. And part of politeness is signing your emails and posts with your name.

So I guess the question is, is there leeway for specific topic areas to "personalize" the guidelines for their topic area?

Thanks-

Answer 1

This is basically covered by the faq

https://pm.stackexchange.com/faq#signatures

Can I use a signature or tagline?

Please don’t use signatures or taglines in your posts. Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you — fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!

I hope you can understand that someone with 500 posts, and 500 distinct "signature" lines -- now multiply that by dozens or hundreds of users -- this is not increasing the signal to noise ratio on the internet, which is one of our goals as an organization.

We do, of course, encourage you to put tons of information about yourself on your user page, which is very clearly linked to from every post and comment you make.

Answer 2

PMSE Meta is exactly the kind of place where you can bring up feature requests, ask questions about the Q&A site, and participate in ideas for the growth of the site.

For general issues, such as the signature request, this has already been established on the main meta site, http://meta.stackoverflow.com. Adding any type of signature is redundant, a waste of space, and is extra noise. Each person's answer is already signed using their automated StackExchange user signature, which links back to his or her profile page.

The site FAQ also contains information on site policies. Most of the FAQ is all boilerplate text that is common to every site on the network.

UPDATE:

While I can see your point about politeness in emails, Stack Exchange sites are inherently different than emails. On Stack Exchange sites, I like to imagine that I'm writing a news article or blog post when I compose an answer.

In these scenarios, when addressing a larger audience, it's not typically common to include a signature. Since one of the main goals of the Stack Exchange sites is to write great content that targets the community as a whole, adding something that targets the individual seems somewhat contradictory.

When you think of your answers as targeting a wider audience -- not just the question asker -- and when you consider that every post you make here is automatically signed, this makes any personalized signature not only redundant, but distracting from the goals of the site, which is to create great content that can be found on search engines for years to come.

The analytics are looking better! The traffic from search engines is improving. The more on-topic content and keywords we have, the better our results will be. I encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and creating great content by sharing your PM expertise with others and operating within the guidelines of the SE network :) Thank you for your participation and contributions to the growth of this site! :)

Answer 3

Basic politeness is also being straightforward and uncluttered. Greetings, introductions asking permission to ask a question, thanks in advance, and other "decorative" phrases serve a purpose, but also comes at a cost. If we make the culture for the site such that these things are understood rather than repeated every post, we can have the social benefit (we all understand that it's not imposing on people to ask a simple question here, for example), without so much of the cost.