Tagline
A randomly picked one-liner that the offline reader stuck to the end of every BBS post — often the only part of the message anyone remembered.
On 1980s and 1990s bulletin boards and FidoNet conferences, posts tended to end with a line opening with three dots: ... I'm not late, I'm temporally challenged.. Offline readers such as Blue Wave and OLX, and editors like GoldED, pulled a line from a text file holding thousands of them, so every reply got a fresh one. Sysops traded collections, and the big ones ran to five-digit line counts.
Where a Usenet signature said something about the sender, the tagline existed almost purely to be funny. Results varied. The same puns turned up in thousands of posts a week, and an entire subgenre consisted of taglines about taglines — "... Tagline stolen from another message". The humour was about the same as today; the delivery was more automated.