Leaving Your Mark on the Neoboards

The answer is, of course, the presentation of your post! Whether board-goers like to admit it or not, an aesthetic font coupled with a well thought-out signature gives a far better first impression than someone with the default Avatar and no font. So if you want to dress your posts to impress, all you have to do is follow this simple guide for finding the signature that suits your unique style!

Step One: Starting Out

The first thing you have to know about making a signature is where to type it in. On the main Neoboards page, follow the Chat Preferences link and scroll down to the section labeled “NeoSignature”. Inside that little textbox lies a whole universe of possibilities that we will explore together in this guide.

Step Two: What Kind of Signature?

With the knowledge of where to type on hand, it is time to move onto the actual signature. Deciding exactly what you want to be in your signature is probably the most important step of this process. Your perfect signature is not going to just pop out of thin air in front of your face. No, you have to sit there and brainstorm for a bit. Here are a few of the most popular categories I have seen to help you get started on some ideas:

-Number of Avatars.

-Quotes. Want to express your love for your favorite book or movie? Add a quote in your signature! (Just make sure it is Neo-appropriate)

-Beauty Contest Link. Having the link in your signature means you can ask people to spare a vote for your pet without having to copy and paste the link over and over again.

-Advertisements. This is a good way to get more people to visit your Screenie page or your shop.

-Insightful phrases. Use a sentence that is sure to make anyone who reads it stop and think for a moment.

-Phrase matching your avatar. The latest trend in font-making seems to be having your entire font compliment your avatar. For example, if you were using the Star Gazer avatar, you could put “Wish upon a star” as your signature.

-Siggy pets. These cute creatures made from ASCII are another popular choice for many Neopians. There are many webpages full of siggy pets waiting to be adopted by a loving owner. Often, the pets come with a counter of how many hugs, kicks, or cookies they have received. They have even been known to organize Siggy Pet Sleepovers for themselves and their owners.

Remember, if you come up with a totally fresh and original idea, use it! You don’t have to pick a topic from this list. Now, do you have a basic idea in your head? Good. Now move onto Step Three.

Step Three: Formatting

There are a million ways you could choose to format your Neosignature. You could have colorful fonts, small fonts, italicized, bold, smilies to dress it up, or any combination of the aforementioned! You are given artistic license to format your signature however you think it will compliment you for the most.

You can layer tags on each other. An example is if you want your signature to be bold AND in italics. To do this, you would simply type:

[b][i]SIGGYHERE[/i][/b]

Most important, don’t forget to close all of your tags! Otherwise, they won’t work at all.

Extra: Pre-Signature

Now that you have your perfect signature, it is time to think about the rest of your font. Many people have a Pre-siggy, or text that goes before your post. Again, there are endless options of what you can add here. Some people choose to put their name, while others add a little blurb or favorite phrase.

A question I hear a lot is how to get your pre-signature above your post. To do this, you need to add a line break ([br]) like so:

PRESIGGYHERE[br]FONTHERE

Now your message will appear on the the line underneath your pre-signature.

Other Tips

Before you put the finishing touches on your Neosignature, I just have a few more tips on making that siggy the best that it can be.

-Check your spelling and grammar. Your signature will appear underneath every single post you make, and if there is a spelling mistake, other chatters will probably not take what you have to say as seriously as someone who demonstrated their literacy.

-Don’t use a giant size. Large fonts do nothing but take up room and look obnoxious. You don’t want the first impression someone has of you to be of an annoying signature, do you?

-Don’t overuse animated smilies in your fonts. Drawing more unnecessary attention to your signature will take away from your message in your post. Plus, it is annoying to some.

-Try not to use an obscure font that people have to download to see. If someone doesn’t have the font downloaded, then they’ll just see the default font instead of the one you intended.

-Centering is your friend. As a general rule of thumb, signatures look better centered.

-Stay away from overly decorated cursive fonts that are incredibly hard to read. If someone cannot easily read your signature, it is likely they will just skip over it.

-One question I see come up a lot on the Avatar/Neosignature board is “How do you remove your siggy line?” Sometimes your font does look better without it. First off, the siggy line is the dashed line that separates your NeoHTML from your Neosignature. To remove it, you must put an open tag at the end of your NeoHTML and a close tag at the front of your Neosignature like so:

NeoHTML

FONTHERE[

NeoSignature

]SIGGYHERE

Hopefully, by the time you have reached this sentence, you have amassed enough information to transform your signature from a tiny seed of thought in your brain, into a full fledged signature that will impress even the Neoboard’s toughest critics.

Well, we have come to the end of the guide, and I just have one last thing to say to you: What are you waiting for? Go out into the boards and leave your mark!