UDWiki:Administration/Policy Discussion/Sig policy update
See current policy here.
Changes from the current policy are bolded. This is still a work in progress, see the talk page.
Reason
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.
Template signatures have the potential to be used for vandalism because there have never been any clear guidelines to stop people from changing signatures into something destructive. Edits to your own user page cannot be considered vandalism unless you impersonate someone. However an edit to a signature can be much more destructive to a wiki then any amount of attempted vandalism may be. This is because 1, User pages are protected so the signature cannot be edited by anyone else, and 2, because if the user has signed a lot of pages then it would be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate all of the users vandalism due to the fact that hundreds of people would have made edits over the users edits. This policy aims to allow administrators to revert this form of vandalism.
Required Link
The handle portion of your signature must link to your user page or one its subpages so that it is easy for readers to learn more about the person behind the signature. Superscript adornments, images and other parts of your signature may link to other locations provided that such links do not violate the rules below.
"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.
What wouldn't be allowed
- Signatures which have images higher then 14 pixels high.
- Signatures which generally break the wiki in some way either through formatting or other means.
- Signatures which impersonate another user.
- Signatures which link to any of the following special pages: Special:Userlogout or Special:BlockIP.
- Signatures which link to external links that perform malicious actions (closing the browser for example).
- Signatures which contain images larger then 50kb.
- 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.
What would be allowed
- Anything that doesn't come under what isn't allowed.
Punishment
Whole section removed for rework.
