The Most Popular Signature
on the Internet
First of its kind · since 2003
Live
This sign shows your own IP address, your provider, and your browser, rendered the moment it loads. Reload and the quote changes.
How it worked
In 2003 this little sign did something no one had seen in a forum signature. It read your connection and drew you into the picture. Your IP address, your provider, the browser you were running, all painted into a graphic that refreshed every time the page loaded. People argued in forum threads about how a signature could possibly know where they were coming from.
The trick was simple once you saw it. The image was not an image at all. It was
a program pretending to be a JPEG, reading each request and rendering a fresh
sign for every viewer. It spread to message boards across the internet and, at
its peak, served on the order of millions of images a day.
Two decades later it still runs, on the same vipersig.jpg address
it always had.