Guild Wars Wiki:Sign your comments/Draft 070731

This policy defines how and when signatures are to be used, in addition to outlining rules regarding what is an acceptable signature.

The purpose of signatures
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 useful tools for identification and attribution, and thus frequent changes to your signature's appearance will reduce its effectiveness.

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. Yet it should be noted that unsigned comments, while discouraged, have the same weight as signed comments. An explanation on how to deal with unsigned comments is explained in a later section.

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
Adding your username at the end of your comment counts as the most simple signature. However the wiki provides a convenient and encouraged way to sign your comments, by placing four tildes (~) at the end of the comment. Check out our help article for more information 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 used for identification purposes instead.

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 (e.g. with the unsigned template). Be very careful that you do not give attribution of an unsigned comment to the wrong user.

Customizing your signature
A registered user can choose to customize his or her signature, however, to keep the wiki readable, there are several limits on customized signatures, described below.

General rules
A distracting, confusing, or otherwise unsuitable signature adversely affects other users. It can be disruptive to discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. When customizing your signature, please adhere to the following rules:


 * Clearly display your username in your signature.
 * Do not use characters that are not in your user name to represent the characters in your name. For example, substituting characters in a manner such as leet speak makes it difficult for users to interpret your name.
 * A shortened version of your username is allowed. However, you must ensure that there is not actually another user already registered with your shortened username.
 * You are expected to register the shortened version as a new user account and create a redirect from that account to your main account's user page.
 * Should the shortened version belong to another person, you are not allowed to sign with it.
 * The shortened version must be easily recognized as being a shorter form of your user name.
 * Advertisements or offensive material are strictly not allowed in signatures.
 * You are allowed to use exactly one image or icon in your signature (see the section on images below).

Links
You must at least include a link to your user page or your talk page. Your signature can only contain links to your user page, your talk page, or your contributions page. Any other internal or external links are not allowed in your signature.

Formatting
The most important rule for signature formatting is that they must not be disruptive to the normal flow of text on a talk page. The following are several examples of problematic and disallowed formatting:


 * Line breaks ( tags) are not allowed as they disrupt the flow of text by unnecessarily increasing the display space for signatures.
 * Markup tags,  , and   (which produce big , sup, and sub text) are not allowed; they disrupt the normal spacing between rows of text. Note that the   tag is allowed.
 * Do not make your signature so small that it becomes difficult to read.
 * Do not use text animations as it causes visual disruption of the text page.
 * Do not use any background color or background pattern in your signature.
 * Do not create rainbow-colored signatures or use colors that are too bright or disturbing. Be aware that certain colors cannot be seen by people with color blindness.

Bear in mind that complex formatting results in complex and unnecessarily long markup code, which in turn results in reduced readability of talk pages while in editing mode. See the section on length further below.

Images
One icon is allowed as part of one's signature. The rules regarding such an icon are as follows:


 * The user's signature may show at most one image (or icon).
 * The image is constrained to a maximum size of 19x19 pixels, to minimize visual disruption.
 * The image used must be named appropriately (e.g. Image:User Example sig.png as the signature image of User:Example). Do not directly use an image or icon meant for other parts of Guild Wars Wiki or one that is used by another user.
 * The image used must redirect to the user page or talk page of that user and be tagged with user image.
 * The image used must not be an animated image.
 * Do not use too many colors or colors that are too bright or disturbing. Be aware that certain colors cannot be seen by people with color blindness.

Length
Signatures that contain a lot of markup or code are often unnecessarily long. Long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing more difficult when attempting to follow a discussion in editing mode. A 300-character signature, for instance, is likely larger than many of the comments to which it is appended to.

Strive to keep the total number of characters in your custom signature to around 150 characters, with reasonable leniency given to users with long user names. The length of the timestamp can be excluded.

The resulting signature (as it appears on talk pages after saving an edit) should generally be no wider than about 150 pixels, excluding the time and date.

Page transclusion
User signatures are not to be stored on a separate page, ie your custom signature must be wholly in the "Nickname" text box in your preferences, due to the reasons below.


 * 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.

Failure to adhere
If a signature is found to be in violation of this policy, a notice should be placed on that user's talk page explaining the violation and requesting compliance. That user is expected to comply with the notice within a week. Failure to comply would warrant a subsequent warning notice on that user's talk page. Further ignorance of the warning after 3 days (especially if that user was seen to be active around the wiki after the warning) may be construed as purposeful defiance of policy and administrators are then allowed to ban the user in question for a short time period. A subsequent longer ban is placed if that user persists in defying this policy.

With regards to the subjective elements of this policy, such as the misuse of formatting or colors and overly long signatures, all users are expected to comply with requests to modify their signature should there be multiple valid and reasonable complaints from several different users. Ignoring such requests may be construed as being in violation of this policy.