Indeed. Signatures are a horrible forum feature, especially if they are not heavily limited.

I can't help but wonder if the decision to rule out signatures has anything to do with a certain someone from the GPG forums with an animated sig...some of u supcom players should be able to give some guesses at who I'm thinking of  

Well I think signatures are a good thing, it frames the posts and make them easier to read (in my oppinion) as long as they aren't too big or ugly

I usually look for the avatar to the left side of a post to notice that it's a new post. I wish the nested quotes would work better though.

Each reply has an alternating background color--you don't need to squint at borders or lines. If you aren't seeing the backgrounds as different you might need to play with your monitor's settings a bit.

Hmm well I can see those, though not very clearly, but that doesn't matter. The thing is that I have to look for the first word of the actual post. I usually end up reading the date first, because that is the first thing appearing as normal text, and then realizing I have look down a bit more. It's not that big of a problem, this is certainly not a huge complaints, it just doesn't feel entirely intuitive for me. But hey, I'm just one person. If all others think it's good this way then I'll just get used to it

PS1: this is only when browsing through the page quick. if I read the topic post by post then it's less hard.

PS2: looking back at my own post it's very easy to see where I should start reading when someone quoted first. Don't exactly know why it 'feels' different compared to other posts and/or forums.