Remember when forum signatures were a mile long with glitter text and pixel art?

I was looking at an old gaming forum from 2005 I used to visit, and every single post had a huge signature with animated gifs, song lyrics, and a visitor counter. Now, most forums have either tiny text-only sigs or got rid of them completely. The change happened slowly over maybe 8 years as forums moved to cleaner, faster-loading designs on phones. It's weird to think that whole culture of personalizing your little corner of a thread is just gone. Anyone else miss making those overly complicated signatures, or was it just a mess?

3 comments

3 Comments

claire9921mo ago

Visitor counters! I forgot those were even a thing.

betty_shah1mo ago

They were the original flex for a personal website. My GeoCities page had one that never got past double digits. It was a simpler, sadder time.

casey9431mo ago

Wait, your counter only got double digits? Thats brutal @betty_shah. I remember spending hours trying to get mine to look like it would flip over like an old school odometer or something. My page had that tacky neon green font on a black background and I was so proud of those 47 hits. The real trick was refreshing the page yourself a few times to bump it up before your friends saw lol.