User:Ricken/SandboxPG/Signatures
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Signing your posts on talk pages (normally using four tildes (~~~~)), both for the article and non-article namespaces, is good practice, and facilitates discussion by helping identify the author of a particular comment. Other users can then navigate to a talk page and address their comments to the specific, relevant user(s). Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing, because it helps all users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.
Comments posted on user talk pages, article talk pages and other discussion pages should be properly signed. Signature use that is intentionally and persistently disruptive may lead to blocks.
When editing a page, main namespace articles should not be signed, because the article is a shared work, based on the contributions of many people, and one editor should not be singled out above others.
How to sign your posts
There are two ways to sign your posts:
- At the end of your comments simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~.
- If you are using the edit toolbar option (it usually appears above the edit screen as a default), click the signature icon to add two hyphens and four tildes like this: --~~~~.
Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.
Note that if you choose to contribute without logging in, regardless of whether you have an account, you should still sign your posts. In this case your IP address will take the place of your username, and will link to your contributions history.
Other options
Typing three tildes results in the addition of your signature without a time and date immediately following. However, since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way only when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.
Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature. In general, when communicating with others, you should use one of the previous options, and not only a timestamp.
Customizing your signature
Every editor's default signature (defined by MediaWiki:Signature) will display when Ricken (talk) 20:07, 15 April 2016 (EDT) is typed. This looks like:
Example (talk) 03:24, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Unregistered/not-logged-in users who sign manually with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon. or 192.58*, still have their IP address stored in the page history. If you choose to sign in that way, to make it easier for other users to communicate with you, you should still type four tildes: --192.58* Ricken (talk) 20:07, 15 April 2016 (EDT).
Customizing how you see your signature
To change how your signature appears to you when you are logged-in, but not to other users, you can create a personal CSS style sheet for your own convenience. For example, to display your username in bold reversed out of orange (like this: Your_username), add the following to Special:MyPage/common.css, replacing Your_username with your actual username:
#bodyContent a[title="User:Your_username"] { background-color: #ffa500; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; }
When you use this technique a highlight will be displayed wherever you sign a talk-page post, and also anywhere [[User:Your_username]] appears, e.g. in your watchlist, in page histories, and if anyone links to you in a discussion. As you are the only person who will see your custom signature, you can use a bright color to help you scan long pages more quickly. Alternative colors can be researched via the Web colors article.
You can remove or modify the highlighting effect at any time by changing the instruction from your style sheet. The change will apply to all pages regardless of how old they may be.
Customizing how everyone sees your signature
Registered users can customize their signatures by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Signature". This changes the signature seen by everyone. It can be used to sign your posts with a nickname, or with custom formatting, or both.
This technique only applies where you have signed a page while logged in. It doesn't affect how your username appears in your watchlist, in page histories, or where someone else has linked to your user page in a discussion. When you remove or modify your signature, the change will apply to your future posts, but the signatures on your existing posts will be unchanged.
If you do not check the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box, the exact content you enter will be used as your signature. For example, if User:Example had set their signature to read NICKNAME, thereafter the signature (generated when they mark a post with ~~~~) would be:
NICKNAME (talk) 03:24, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
If you check the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box, you can describe your signature using "raw" wikitext (such as and wiki-markup) which will be substituted unchanged when you sign your posts. If User:Example had set their signature to read [[User:Example|Ex@''mple'']]<sup>[[User talk:Example|t@lk]]</sup>, the signature generated by ~~~~ would be:
Ex@mplet@lk 03:24, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
If you wish to include the pipe (|) or equals (=) characters, these must be escaped, or they will break templates unexpectedly when your signature is present. To escape the | symbol, you can use | and to escape the = character, = will work.
A customised signature should make it easy to identify the username, to visit the user's talk-page, and preferably user page. Because these signatures are seen by everyone, be aware of the guidelines and policies below.
What not to include in a signature
Signature forgery
Never use another editor's signature. Impersonating another editor by using his or her username or signature is forbidden. Altering the markup code of your signature to make it look substantially like another user's signature may also be considered a form of impersonation. Editing the code of your signature to link it to another editor's user page is not permitted. It is also ineffective, as the change log of the page records the IP address and (if applicable) username of all editors; as such, any impersonators can easily be caught if the signature in the diff view differs from the editor's default signature. While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the username it represents.
Appearance and color
Your signature must not blink, scroll, or otherwise cause inconvenience to or annoy other editors.
- Avoid markup which enlarges text; this is likely to disrupt the way that surrounding text displays.
- Do not add line breaks (<br />), which can also negatively affect nearby text display.
- Be sparing with subscript and superscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed.
- Do not make your signature so small that it is difficult to read.
- If you use different colors in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with color blindness, defective color vision, and other visual disabilities.
- Do not include horizontal rules (---- or <hr />).
Images
Images of any kind must not be used in signatures, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown.
Length
Keep signatures short, both in display and in markup. Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing and discussion more difficult. Signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures.
Links
Signatures must include at least one direct internal link to your user page, user talk page, or contributions page; this allows other editors easy access to your talk page and contributions log. The lack of such a link is widely viewed as obstructive.
It is better to put information on your user page rather than in your signature. Brief additional internal links are generally tolerated when used to facilitate communication or to provide general information, but undesirable if seen as canvassing for some purpose.
Do not place any disruptive internal links (especially when combined with custom formatting, for example CLICK HERE!!!) in your signature.
Do not include links to external websites in your signature. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a website with which you are associated, you can do so on your user page.
Transclusions of templates and parser functions in signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example) are forbidden.
Signatures must not contain categories.
Non-Latin characters
Editors with non-Latin usernames are welcome to edit AmtWiki. However, non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Indic scripts, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Thai and others, are illegible to most other contributors. Not everyone uses a keyboard that has immediate access to non-Latin characters, and names that cannot be pronounced cannot be retained in memory. As a courtesy to the rest of the contributors, users with such usernames are encouraged to sign their posts (at least in part) with Latin characters. For an example, User:Oбразец might choose to sign their posts as Oбразец/Obrazets.
