Wikipedia talk:Signatures

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[edit] How?

Can someone help me make a defalt signature, I can't get mine to work as a default. This is it, if you need it-KjtheDj what do you want? Contributions

I have made a sig too, but,when I type the final result " appears as coded differently, And so does '<'+'>'! Can you Help!The WikiWhippet (deeds)22:01, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How? (Please Answer!)

How can you make your signature have all those different colors and things? I'm a first time person on Wiki, so please answer my question! How do you make your signature look neat like yours? Have any tips, anybody? ♥Smartie960♥(talk with me!)♥ 00:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Plus, what codes can I use to get my signature that way? The signature i have right now is a code I got from someone. I know that there is more I can do to my signature, but what? please answer? Can you all give me some codes? I know to go to preferences and type in the code where it says signature then check raw signature, but I need some codes! Please help! ♥Smartie960♥(talk with me!)♥ 00:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

You can use standard HTML and CSS "code" <span style="background:purple;color:white">text</span> produces text for example. Elaborate signatures are discouraged though, so keep it clean, readable and short (no rainbow color gradients that result in 10 lies of code in the edit window whenever you sign and such). --Sherool (talk) 09:41, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, Sherool! This is my new signature: ♥Smartie960♥ (Chatter Box) 21:55, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm afraid that it's almost completely unreadable. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 22:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I second that (hurts my eyes too). John Reaves (talk) 23:50, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Move the span tags inside the link like this: [[User:Smartie960|<span style="color:lightblue;background:green;border-style: double">♥Smartie960♥</span>]]. That way the link text will be light blue as well and easier to read against the green background. --Sherool (talk) 13:04, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok I did that and here it is:

♥Smartie960♥(Chatter Box)

[edit] Examples

We should have some examples under the custome signature section. Users should not have to hunt on the talk page to learn the basics of creating a raw signature. I'm still in the process of trying to figure out how to change my date and remove the old date once you get the new date attached. I don't expect all the tricks but some table of the basics would be nice. Morphh (talk) 14:32, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Please don't mess with the date, several high trafic pages are automaticaly archived by bots depending on when the last post in a section was made, non-standard date strings will be ignored and cause the section to be archived prematurely. Not to mention it becomes harder to follow when something was posted if everyone used theyr own custum date format. --Sherool (talk) 15:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I didn't want to change the format, just the size. Like "15:57, 3 March 2007 (UTC)" Morphh (talk) 15:57, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Ethiopic

[edit] Evasion of policy at WP:U

I've raised this over at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/User names, and it was suggested that I also raise it here.

My original question:
Maaparty (talk • contribs) uses the signature --God and religion are distinct. I've asked him to change it (and in fact I've blocked him for an unrelated offence), but if he refuses to change, can he be blocked under the User-name policy, or is there some other route?

Everyone agrees that this shouldn't be allowed, but it seems that the fact (yet again) that Wikipedia:Signatures is only a guideline, not a policy, means that all a user needs to do (perhaps when blocked after an RfC on his User name) is choose an innocuous User name and then use the blocked name in his sig.

Any ideas as to how to deal with this? --Mel Etitis (Talk) 19:56, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

  • I feel that WP:SIG should loosely reflect the rules that currently exist at WP:U otherwise it basically makes a mockery of the process. There's nothing essentially wrong with Nuclear Jesus Hentai Terrorism (a summary of last week's WP:U :) ) as a signature. At the very least, it should be non-offensive although some of the issues (like the "=" sign) should not apply to sigs - Alison☺ 20:21, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
    • I agree. the question is, what ones do apply? and how to enforce it. I personally feel that, as stated above, many of the username policies should apply to signatures. (with a few exceptions, such as non latin characters etc etc). -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 20:36, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
      • May I make a suggestion? I could possibly come up with a sub-set of the WP:U policy, merge it into the existing WP:SIG guidelines and post it under here as a sub-page for commentary. As things are hashed out, editors can hack away on it until consensus is reached. Thoughts?? - Alison☺ 20:49, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

That's a good start. The problem, though, will still be that this page isn't policy. As I've argued (with some support) above, that should change. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 21:05, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Ok - I'll try putting something together over the next day or so. I guess it won't become policy anyway until something concrete is done and a rough consensus is achieved. Things are broken the way they are right now so we may do our best to patch it up - Alison☺ 00:04, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I would unequivocally support WP:SIG being integrated into WP:U. If :V, :RS and :OR can be tied together as WP:ATT, then these two can and should be. Deiz talk 13:48, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Non-Latin, but the other way round

I've just come across a signature in Greek, thought the user name isn't. Any thoughts? --Mel Etitis (Talk) 23:22, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

It's fine. We have several users, such as User:Nihonjoe, who sign in Japanese, and I'm thinking Japanese fonts are a bit less common than Greek ones are. --tjstrf talk 20:26, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't think that you understand the problem; we ask people with non-Latin User names to use a Latin version in their signatures; it's surely perverse to allow people with Latin-text User names to use a non-Latin signature. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 09:34, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
A signature whose sole purpose on an English Wikipedia is to produce a greeked version of the latin username is a bad idea. This is so obvious that it shouldn't be difficult to convince the user in question. --Tony Sidaway 08:31, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Category" restriction addition

As 01-April-2007 and Category:Pages blessed by the input of Wikipedia user tjstrf has shown, it is overwhelmingly obvious why categories should never be in signatures. I fully endorse this guideline addition by User:Cyde [1]. — xaosflux Talk 01:14, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I also endorse the change. I first mentioned the ability to put categories in sigs almost half a year ago[2], and brought up the rule deficiency in several later sig-related discussions as well, but nobody ever took it seriously. Having a rule against sig categories implemented was an ulterior motive to my use of the prank in the first place. My apologies to whoever ended up depopulating it for me though, I was planning on doing that myself when April Fool's ended in my time zone.
Maybe next year I'll make my sig end with <nowiki>? :) ...OK, maybe not. --tjstrf talk 07:00, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Actually, the developers thought of that. You'll find you get an error trying to save your signature if it contains unbalanced tags. --ais523 14:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I checked that earlier and the end result is that all your tags get converted into the url-coded equivalents. There's either a similar safeguard against me ending my sig with ''' and bolding the rest of the page, or it just results in an error, since when I tested that the end result was all of my signature being bolded but not the rest of the page. --tjstrf talk 16:34, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Nice cat! :-DDDDD very big laugh... I wish I had caught it in action... oh, that would have been even more hilarious! (→Netscott) 17:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I disagree because I've found a workaround, everything after this is nowikied--User:Rock2e Talk - Contribs 20:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Not surprising, but it's probably not a good idea to specifically ban whatever method you used because it will give people ideas. --tjstrf talk 22:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Maybe it is worthy of a ban if I can put images in my sig, please delete it after looking.--User:Rock2e Talk - Contribs 07:18, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually, while I think about it, if WP could allow image links to upload.wikimedia.org then I could argure with most of the policies: Many concerns have been raised over the use of images in signatures, and they are considered to serve no use to the encyclopedia project. Images in signatures shall not be used for several reasons:

  • they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown

|a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks (not if you link to the right version, even if it is a new version, it will be the first one in the history.) they reduce searchability, making pages more difficult to read

  • they make it more difficult to copy text from a page. (Not really, if you try and copy and paste my sig and paste it then you'll miss out the images)
  • they are potentially distracting from the actual message. (Not if they are 16px)

in most browsers images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without. (Didn't happen with my sig (See above))

  • they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page. (They don't if you externally link to the image.)
  • images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution.

[edit] Links in signatures

Do offsite links apply to counters and other Wikimedia wikisites? The counter is on tool.wikimedia.de. Does the WM own this server? Buick 22:48, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Links to Wikimedia essentially are covered by WP:SIG#Internal links and shouldn't pose a problem. Netscott 22:57, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
No. Seriously, do not add a counter to your signature. This is an abuse of Wikipedia. --Tony Sidaway 08:28, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Length

I'm about to add the following clause to the section about signature length:

  • Signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing the editor to scroll when writing his reply. The presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating his reply.

Comments welcome. --Tony Sidaway 08:27, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree but I have a workaround for the long code, but it means you can put unbalanced tags and imags in as well so WP:BEANS means that I shouldn't put it here.--User:Rock2e Talk - Contribs 10:25, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] SUBST:'d templates.

The reasons presented here do not apply to SUBST:'d signatures, as: vandalizing the template wont change anything, since SUBST:s are a sort of copy-paste from the template, it will not change globally with a subst:, and server load only increases however much subst:ing normal templates do. Can I use a subst: like I am now?Blastedt•(talk•contribs) 14:26, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

IMO, it seems ok as long as the vandal doesn't change the template, to protect it, move the page to .css, this will protect it from vandalism from everyone except admins and yourself.BTW you found out how I put images in, see above.--User:Rock2e Talk - Contribs 16:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
You need to move User:Blastedt/~ to User:Blastedt/~.css to protect it.--User:Rock2e Talk - Contribs 16:41, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Couldn't images be put in manually? ._0 Oh, and thanks. Blastedt•(talk•contribs) 18:17, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't think so, in the policy it says that it's been removed but that's a way around it. For April Fools next year, I might just put a nowiki at the end of my sig :P —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rock2e (talk • contribs) 08:10, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Internal links

I've changed the wording on internal links to read:

Although it is always better to put information on your userpage rather than your signature, including brief additional internal links is generally tolerated when used to facilitate communication, or to provide general information, but undesirable if seen as canvassing for some purpose.

We should not be encouraging editors to use their signatures as miniature user pages, because this seriously degrades the editing environment for participants on discussion pages, so I'm emphasizing the fact that the user page can hold links without causing this clutter. --Tony Sidaway 06:27, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

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