Help:Signatures

{| cellspacing="7" style="width: 100%; background: #EFFBF5; border: 1px solid silver; margin-top: 10px;" It is important to understand that signatures on Guild Wars Wiki do not indicate ownership or copyright of any part of an article to that user. Signatures are meant more for identification.
 * style="background: #A1C2CF; border: 1px solid silver; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;" | The purpose of signatures

Discussions are an important part of any collaborative editing effort, as they help explain the progress and evolution of a literary work. Signing comments is not just good etiquette. Signatures facilitate discussion by making it easier to follow a discussion between several people, as the standard signature includes both the name of the user and a timestamp for the comment. They also make it easier to navigate talk pages, to address comments to specific users, and to encourage civility by attribution and identification.

When should signatures be used?
Any post or comment made to talk pages should be signed, regardless of the namespace.

When should signatures not be used?
Do not add your signature to an article. As attribution of content is already logged in the history of an article, attempting to claim ownership or credit by signing on an article is not allowed. The only exception to this rule are for special pages in the project namespace where signatures are explicitly requested for (such as elections and adminship requests).

How to sign
There are two ways to sign your comments:


 * 1) At the end of your comments (preferably on the same line), simply type four tildes ( ~ ).
 * 2) The edit toolbar has a signature button [[Image:Button sig.png]] as a convenience to add the four tildes.

Your signature will appear when you save changes or when you preview your changes. The four tildes will result in the following:

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the correct way of signing your comments in discussions.

Variants
Changing the number of tildes will change the resulting signature. While these can be used for other purposes, avoid using these to sign comments.

Three tildes will apply your signature without the timestamp, making this the convenient way to easily provide a link to your user page. Five tildes does the opposite; only the timestamp is added. This is not very useful for easy identification but it is ideal for the correct use of templates like delete and guild cleanup.

Anonymous users
Users who chose to contribute to Guild Wars Wiki without logging in are also encouraged to sign. Without a user name, the IP address will used for identification purposes instead. The IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because of a misconception that the IP address provides more anonymity. In truth, a pseudonymous account (that is, a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity.

Note that signing manually with a pseudonym or tag such as -- anon does not give you more anonymity or privacy protection, since the IP address is logged directly into the page history.

Customizing your signature
A registered user can customize his or her signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the "Signature" field. The text entered into that field will show up as that user's signature instead of the default signature (which contains just the username). Using a nickname which hides your true username or suggests that you are another user are seen as disruptive and are prohibited.

If you want to use a more complex signature (for instance, including your own Wiki markup and HTML markup), check the "Treat signature as wikitext (without an automatic link)" checkbox in your preferences. Just fill the "Signature" field with your desired signature, exactly as you want it to be substituted. Be aware that even the raw signatures option treats markup very strictly, and some markup which works in normal pages will not work in signatures.

The above table shows some sample markup to customize the signature to appear with some simple formatting. Prior to performing any customization, it is important for all users to read through all the following subsections that detail the limits to which a signature can be modified.

Note that there exists a signature policy which regulates to what extent signatures can be customized. Please read that policy before customizing your signature.

Dealing with unsigned comments
When a talk page comment is unsigned, any user can append a note to the unsigned comment to show which user made it.

The unsigned and the unsigned ip templates have been provided for convenience:

Be very careful that you do not give attribution of an unsigned comment to the wrong user.