Guild Wars Wiki:Sign your comments

Signing your comments on talk pages is good etiquette and facilitates discussion by helping with identification. Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing. This policy defines when and how signatures should be used and to be kept reasonable; it does not dictate that signatures must be used. It is important to note that unsigned comments are treated the same as signed comments.

The purpose of signatures
A signature identifies you and your contributions to Guild Wars Wiki. It is a reference by which other users recognize and give attribution to you as a user, which incidentally encourages civility in discussions.

When should signatures be used?
Any post or comment made to talk pages should be signed, regardless of the namespace. A signature aids readers of a discussion by showing the date and time on when comments were made.

When should signatures not be used?
Do not sign on any articles, since a signature does not indicate ownership or copyright of any part of an article. Your edit or contribution will be attributed to you automatically via the revision history of an article.

Any exceptions to this rule will be explicitly mentioned and requested (such as election pages and adminship requests).

How to sign
Adding your username at the end of your comment counts as the most simple signature. However the wiki provides a convenient and recommended way to sign your comments - by placing four tildes (~) at the end of the comment or by clicking on the button at the top of the editing window. Upon saving the page, the four tildes will automatically be replaced with your signature and the current date and time. For more details, see the help on how to sign.

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 be used for identification purposes instead.

Dealing with unsigned comments
When a talk page comment is not signed, any user can append a note to the unsigned comment to show which user made it, using  with the unsigned template. If comment was made by an anonymous user, unsigned ip should be used instead. To add a timestamp on the unsigned comment, unsigned+ is a good template to use. It works on both registered and anonymous users. These are not required but they can be particularly helpful in discussions involving multiple users who did not sign. See the help on how to use the template.

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

Customizing your signature
A registered user can customize his or her signature, but within reason. Read through and understand all of the following before attempting to customize your signature.

When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing, or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors may find them disruptive to discourse on talk pages. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read while editing talk pages.

General rules and considerations
It is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the user name it represents.
 * Do not add offensive or illegal content to your signature (refer to GWW:NPA, GWW:USER, and GWW:COPYRIGHT).
 * Do not attempt to impersonate another user. Avoid having similar signatures to reduce the possibility of mistaken attribution.
 * As this wiki is primarily in English, avoid excessive use of non-Latin characters as it may be illegible to most users or unnecessarily difficult to identify. Users with non-Latin user names should consider using a Latin version of their user name (registering an additional account to redirect one to the other).
 * Do realize that the issue of user names is a subjective matter. If you see a disruptive signature and would like to ask that user to change it, please remember to be polite. If you are being asked to change your signature, please do not interpret a polite request to be an attack. Remain calm and work on getting to a mutually acceptable resolution. Make use of GWW:RFC.
 * Avoid changing your signature often, especially into something entirely different. Your signature is what identifies you as a user, and changing signatures may cause unnecessary confusion and misidentification.

Links
You must at least include a link to either your user page or your talk page. It may optionally also include a link to your contributions. Aside from the above three links, no other internal or external links are allowed. If there are useful pages you wish to bookmark, place them in your user page, not your signature.

Appearance
Your signature should neither inconvenience nor annoy other editors.
 * Markup tags or styles that increase your text size, repositions the text, or otherwise changes the flow of the text, as well as line breaks (such as ) are not allowed.
 * Avoid using hardly readable or uncommon font families and always provide a common alternative font family.
 * Although  is allowed, do not make your signature so small that it becomes difficult to read.
 * Do not use text animations or effects that cause visual disruption of a text page.
 * Be sparing with the use of colors, especially background colors. Avoid using bright and glaring colors that disrupts the readability of a text page.

Length
Use short signatures, both in display and markup.
 * Signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window unnecessarily clutter the edit window and make it more difficult to distinguish meaningful comments from the signatures.
 * The presence of long signatures disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating a response. A 200-character signature, for instance, is already longer than many comments.
 * Long signatures that are not broken by spaces cause edit windows to widen horizontally (any user may add spaces to it).

Images
One small image or icon may be included in your signature.
 * The image used is constrained to a maximum size of 19x19 pixels, to avoid disrupting text spacing and readability.
 * Animated images are not allowed due to the visual disruption they can cause.
 * Be sparing with the use of colors, especially background colors. Avoid using bright and glaring colors that disrupts the readability of a text page.
 * The image used must redirect to either your user page or your talk page (see Help:Redirect on how to do that).
 * Due to the above, the image file you use must be uniquely yours and used by you alone. Upload it under the appropriate name (e.g. Image:User Example sig.png as the signature image of User:Example). See GWW:IMAGE for more details on user images. When uploading, also add user image to the image's description.
 * If an image is used in your signature, include an empty alternative text for accessibility reasons. For example:  (note the space between the   and  ). Alternatively, if the image redirects to your talk page, use "Talk page" or something similar as the alternative text.

Transclusion
Transclusions, templates, and parser functions are generally not allowed in a signature.
 * Transcluded signatures require extra processing and are an unnecessary server drain. Whenever you change the source of a transclusion, all pages transcluding the source must be re-cached.
 * Signature templates are good vandalism targets, allowing others to modify your signature without you noticing it at all. And they continue to be vandalism targets even after you have stopped contributing.
 * The only exception to this is if you subst a .js page from your own userspace. These pages can only be edited by the user who owns it and admins. To do this, enter  (with your own username replacing Example) as your signature in preferences, then go to Special:Mypage/sig.js and edit it with the actual signature you want. All other signature rules still apply.
 * This allows users to have different signatures on GWW and GW2W, despite preferences being shared between the wikis, by editing the sig.js pages on each wiki differently.