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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Miscellaneous/Make signature global

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Make signature global

  • Problem: After a username change all self created signatures become invalid
  • Who would benefit: All users who got name changed
  • Proposed solution: make signature global so only once the signature needs to be updated and not on all projects
  • More comments: another option might be to change the app/procedure used for user rename, but that might be a tad more complicated
  • Phabricator tickets: T188200
  • Proposer:  Klaas `Z4␟` V22:05, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Better if we can't edit our sig at all. Stryn (talk) 20:48, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish: Sorry for bothering you, but would you please explain a bit on how the usage of interface message would be "using dynamic content"? H78c67c (talk) 06:06, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea how all projects approach this, but at en.Wikipedia, we don't permit in sigs the use of templates, parser functions, and other code which may produce changeable content after the sig is rendered. That's for several reasons (e.g. we don't want to make templates be even more of a vandalism target by having them able to mess up millions of sigs at once), but the main one is that sigs shouldn't change. The way it appeared when originally signed at 21:20 15 October 2015 (UTC) or whenever, at a particular page, is how it should continue to appear if the comment is moved (e.g. to an archive page), or quoted whole on another page or even another wiki. It's implicit in what a signature is that it is fixed in time, "indelible". Its possible that projects with such restrictions might make an exception for something like auto-translation, if this were really desired community-wide (on the same basis that we'd already permit something like link-repair in a sig in a post copied from one wiki to another so that the links went to the right page, without altering the appearance of the sig, or permit w:en:WP:LINT cleanup to replace obsolete <font ...> markup with validating but visually equivalent <span style="...">, markup). Given the triviality of sigs (and the ease of just copying your sig from site A to site B), I don't think this is something the WMF devs should expend any resources on, absent a clear mandate from the community that we collectively wanted this more than other wishlist work in this category.  — SMcCandlish ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ʌ<  08:00, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting