Technically, I think it's supposed to be "-- " on a line by itself,
sort of like below.  Many newsgroup programs are automatically set up
to recognize the "-- " and remove the stuff after it when quoting.  If
your sig happens to be broken, it's not a big deal; I can just select
and delete the sig when quoting.

I don't see anything wrong with your signature, although it might
appear different in another newsreader.

BTW, I've been in ngs where they tried to maintain uniform top
-or-bottom posting for ease of reading, and I understand that
perfectly.   If anyone asked me to do it in a particular way because
that was the way they did it in the ng, I don't think that's anything
to get honked about.

Theresa
My Blog: http://www.humanitas.blogspot.com
alt.tv.frasier FAQ: http://www.im-listening.net/FAQ/

OH, for crying out loud. We care about what you have to say, not your grasp of
netiquette!  But bless your heart for being so patient and *nice* that you're
trying to correct whatever it is they want you to do. I have no idea!

Sherry

I think (s)he means the  "The email of the species is more deadly than
the mail." which follows your signature.  I dunno what "broken" means,
though, since it comes out just fine on my screen:  two dashes below the
"Bev", then your tag line below that.

The purpose of formatting sigs with an initial line consisting of two dashes
and one space is to allow news-reading programs to recognize what is message
and what is signature.
And in response to your hint that you don't consider top v bottom posting to
matter: ARRGGGHH!!! The *O*N*L*Y* people who have any excuse for turning
threads inside-out are ones who read from bottom to top. Unless you are
Chinese, post the way people R#E#A#D!

I have no idea what the sender meant, but I love your sig line.

Joy

Bev - only anal, pedantic geeks with no life get all bent out of shape
about the top/bottom posting thing. Most normal humans have more important
things to worry about! So don't let it get to you.

As for the .sig thing, you probably just need to put a space after the
two dashes (not between them - I can't think why told you that), so that
newsreader software that's looking for that sequence as a delimiter
between the end of your post and the start of your signature can find it.

Joyce

  Like that argument, if everyone did it right, and used decent
software, then the web would be a far nicer place, and reading and
replying to email and newsgroups would be about 30 to 40% quicker.

  A sig is added by decent software to all emails and posts.  As you see
mine is always added, but if you get an email from me it will contain a
different sig - and if you look on my bridge newsgroups htere will be a
different sig again.

  Good software will strip the sig off when replying.  But how does it
recognise the sig?  Easy: it always starts with a line containing
dash-dash-space [see below].

  Of course, Micro$oft could not be bothered to follow any helpful
practices so their software does not do this.  Wonderful.

Many news readers take a line consisting entirely of some number of
'-' characters the end of the message and automatically delete the
.sig when auto quoting.  Since it is pointless to include the .sig in
the quoted material and a waste of bandwidth, I consider your format
not broken, but considerate - I would put the marker ahead of the
'Bev' part since that isn't needed either (it usually appears in the
automatic introduction line that readers insert when replying).

T.E.D. (tdavis@gearbox.maem.umr.edu - e-mail must contain "T.E.D." or my .sig in the body)