Misplaced Pages

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This page documents an English Misplaced Pages ]. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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This page in a nutshell: Sign all your posts on Misplaced Pages talk pages by typing ~~~~ to be accountable and to help others understand the conversation.

Signing your posts on all Misplaced Pages talk pages (but not on articles) is an important aspect of Misplaced Pages's developed etiquette, and an essential aspect of the community communication that helps articles to be formed and developed. Discussion helps other users who are reading talk pages to understand the progress and evolution of a dialogue, and to better offer their help, and to more easily judge users who are accountable to their comments.

Because of this, developers created a very easy way to create signatures. To automatically sign your posts with a date-stamp, add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your message; or add three tildes (~~~) to add just your name (although in general, using the full date-stamp is preferred.) Editors with the edit toolbar option enabled under Special:Preferences can click the signature icon () located at the top of edit boxes to add the four tildes.

Basics

Here's a list of all the signature options:

See also Automatic conversion of wikitext in Help.

If you chose to contribute to Misplaced Pages without logging in, the tildes will be converted to your IP address to be displayed as your signature. Your IP address might look something like this: 140.27.598.214. (An account actually provides you with more anonymity, if you are concerned about IP privacy issues.)

If your preferred signature consists of non-ASCII characters (Chinese, for example), you are encouraged to use ASCII characters in them as well. This is because not everyone can view certain characters, and instead may find a box or other replacement where the non-ASCII character would properly be.

Customizing your signature

Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Nickname". The software automatically places ] around the text entered in this field, so that whatever nickname you choose to use as a signature will be linked to your user page. Although not a policy, it seems to be common practice (and common courtesy) to use a signature name that is either identical or closely related to your account name, or to use your real name.

If you want to use a more complex signature (for instance, including a link to your talk page), you can choose the "Raw signatures (without automatic link)" checkbox in your Preferences. Just fill the "Your nickname" field with your desired signature, exactly as you want it to be substituted for the tildes. Note that some older ways of doing it do not work any more — see Misplaced Pages:How to fix your signature if you are having problems.

To learn exactly how to make complex signatures, go to Misplaced Pages:Tip of the day/June 30, 2006.

Please note that the inclusion of images in your signature is discouraged—it is distracting to many users, puts a small but unnecessary drain on the servers, and can badly distort the normal display of talk pages (especially if the image link should become broken, or the viewer has images turned off in their browsers).

Note also that superscript and subscript characters can disrupt line spacing causing problems in some browsers.

Note that the talk link is somewhat "disguised" in some signatures—it might look like a last name, or even the last letter of a name, or a single symbol. Hovering the mouse pointer over the link should tell you (in a tooltip, browser status bar, or other) whether the link is pointing to "User", "User talk", or something else. Template:Associations/Wikipedia Bad Things

Things to avoid

A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature affects other users, and a user with an unsuitable signature may be required to change it (See Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/-Ril-). Persistent refusal to react in a reasonable way to complaints about your signature may result in a brief block if your signature is infact disruptive (note: just having an image in your signature is not disruption), though this is controversial and can be disputed if you are blocked.

Images and Appearance

There are several objections to having images in signatures. In particular, they are said to cause server slowdown, and serve no purpose in an encyclopedia project other than vanity. In addition, they can unintentionally make pages more difficult to read. There have been some calls for banning them entirely; some people have objected to such a ban, arguing it would stifle creativity.

However, these elements in the signature are discouraged for several reasons:

• they use additional server resources,
• they can reduce searchability and make it more difficult to copy text from a page,
• they are potentially distracting from the actual message,
• in most browsers, images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without.

Your signature also should not blink, as this can annoy many other editors. Neither should it be too long (long signatures with lots of HTML/wikicode may make page editing more difficult), nor contain <big> tags (produces big text), or line breaks (<br /> tags).

It is also possible to be playful with the signature, for example by including ornamental Unicode characters (☻♂♖♥★, etc.) and using CSS styles to format it.

Length

Please try to keep signatures short, because very long signatures cloud up the page source in edit mode, making it harder for other editors to find where your comment stopped. Both images and long signatures carry the danger of giving undue prominence to that user's contribution. Reduce it to the minimum necessary.

Transclusion/template

Avoid using page transclusion or templates for signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example). These are avoidable drains on server resources. Transcluded signatures require extra processing and, whenever you do change your signature source, all talk pages you've posted on must be re-cached. One can imagine the impact if these kinds of signatures were in common use. Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems.

If you really must use a userpage as a source of boilerplate for your signature, at least substitute it so it is only transcluded once, for example {{Subst:User:Name/sig}}.

External links

Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Misplaced Pages. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page is usually viewed as 'linkspamming' or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines. Therefore, signatures must not include external links. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a good website that you are associated with, please do so on your user page.

Dealing with unsigned comments

The template {{unsigned}} can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or ip to the comment.

Usage

{{subst:unsigned|user name or ip|date}}

Example

{{subst:unsigned|Example}} becomes — Preceding unsigned comment added by Example (talk • contribs)

{{subst:unsigned|Example|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}} becomes — Preceding unsigned comment added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)

More about Talk pages

See Misplaced Pages:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.

• Misplaced Pages culture
• Misplaced Pages guidelines
• Misplaced Pages how-to