UDWiki talk:Administration/Policy Discussion/Sig policy update

Reason

Added a piece about the reason we have sigs on a wiki;
The primary reason for signatures on this wiki is so that other users can easily identify who has made a post on talk pages without having to go to the trouble of sifting through page histories. A secondary consideration is that they bring some personalised flair to the wiki, and give people a way to promote their projects and group allegiances that is easily accessible. -- boxy ^{talk • teh rulz} 23:35 14 February 2009 (BST)

Required Link

Added a definition of handle portion:
"The handle portion of your signature" refers to the first few words of your signature (and any image or characters that may be placed before it), which should stand out from any tailing end to the sig. Basically, the obvious part of your sig should be the part that links to your user page, given that the user page link is the primary reason for the signature. -- boxy ^{talk • teh rulz} 23:35 14 February 2009 (BST)

What wouldn't be allowed

Added;

• Links to user pages (or sub pages) other than your own in the handle part of a signature.
• Multiple uses of the <small> tag on the handle part of a signature.

-- boxy ^{talk • teh rulz} 23:35 14 February 2009 (BST)

The first one makes sense the second doesn't. Sigs that break pages are already open to alteration.--Karek^maps?! 03:24, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

What would be allowed

Allowing anything not specifically disallowed opens the policy right up to people "gaming the system" for drama -- boxy ^{talk • teh rulz} 23:35 14 February 2009 (BST)

Punishment

Whole section removed for rework.

Giving a week to fix a signature, to someone who has a high post rate is ridiculous. For example, if SA had been given a week to change his preferences so that he wasn't using a signature that linked equally to both his own and Nubis' user page, there would be hundreds of instances where it would have been included, and given that it wasn't a templated signature, it would be a ridiculous amount of work to change them all back later.
I believe that it should be a few days, or (say) 15 edits (whichever comes first) before they have to meaningfully address such a clear violation of the policy -- boxy ^{talk • teh rulz} 23:35 14 February 2009 (BST)

Discussion

Your additions and alterations lead to inconsistancies, and therefore loopholes, within the policy. Would you like me to rewrite it with this in mind?

The Rooster was speaking about the line breaking nature of superscript that is common in many signatures and suggested that the image height be adjusted accordingly to 17px. Do you think we should include this alteration in the new policy?

High traffic pages such as Talk:Suggestions can sometimes suffer from template breakage due to a critical amount of template calls on a page, should we include in this proposal a moratorium on template calls within templated signatures?

The procedure and punishment section requires severe stipulations given the recent Hagnat situation. Would you care for me to draft this section as well? -- . . <== DDR Approved Editor 00:40, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

1. The small tag thing needs to be re-worded. It looks like you mean "you shouldn't make the handle part too small", so why not say that directly? It's possible to make it small through other means. Actually, I think it should simply say something like "the handle part must be clearly visible and easily identifiable". Making it small isn't the only way of obscuring it. Consider this signature. Not sure how it looks on your monitors, but it's pretty well camouflaged on mine.
2. I think the (code) size of the signature should be limited (a thousand characters should be more than enough). Also, I agree with Iscariot that template calls within a signature should be forbidden.
3. I think it would be better to change the format from a list of things that are not allowed into a list of requirements (such as "handle part must be visible and identifiable"). There's little point in trying to forbid every way of making the handle part obscured, especially if everything that isn't under "not allowed" is allowed. It's just asking for people to find loopholes. But that'd mean scrapping most of the old policy.
4. Oh, and duplicate links should be forbidden. --Midianian^{¦T¦DS¦SP¦}