Opinions?
In fact it's basically the last one bit that could really be a "simple" custom field instead of an hard-coded field.
Having is as custom would also mean a lot more flexibility on positioning the signature, and on the other hand it would force us making the custom fields more flexible as well, supporting more processing than just the simple conditions defined at the moment.
I am not sure how it will help.
I am not clear about that myself. I rather remove most of the postbit first before the signature. But then, I will eventually remove it as well. Even the Re: Topic should be removed IMO. Lols. I removed everything then; making it simpler so it will load faster. ;)
Apparently I mixed up things... I thought gender, location, website and personal text were already custom fields... :-[
Okay, let's change it like that: let's move all that stuff to custom fields?
It would make sense that anything not an account setting could be a "profile field" and the account settings would be account/user settings.
While you are at it, maybe add another setting for profile fields or user options whether to autoload them. Mods often add a bunch of stuff to profiles but they don't want that stuff loaded for every page. Maybe make it load by levels? So a tinyint field. 1 would be what you would load for every page. 2 would be what you would load for board/message index, 3 would be what you would load for display. 4 would be what you would load for memberlist. 5 would be what you would load for profile. Maybe 3/4 are the same. Then if you wanted to load the profile you'd select all of the fields that have a number <= 5.
I don't know, just throwing an idea out there to make it easier for plugins and themes to select which data they want to select for every page without editing queries.
Interesting idea!