Forum:SH Archive/Signatures

Wookieepedia &gt; Senate Hall &gt; 

The following text is taken from Wikipedia:WP:SIG. I would note that none of this is policy here (yet, perhaps it should be); nonetheless, they are good guidelines to follow.

Images and Appearance
There are several objections to having images in signatures. In particular, they are said to cause server slowdown, and to serve no purpose in an encyclopedia project other than vanity in addition to making pages more difficult to read. There have been some calls for banning them entirely; some people have objected to such a ban, arguing it would stifle creativity.

However, these elements in the signature are discouraged for several reasons:
 * they use additional server resources
 * they can reduce searchability and make it more difficult to copy text from a page
 * they are potentially distracting from the actual message
 * in most browsers, images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without.

Your signature also should not blink, as this annoys many other editors. Neither should it be too long (long signatures with lots of HTML/wikicode may make page editing more difficult), nor contain  tags (produces big text), or line breaks (  tags)

It is also possible to be playful with the signature, for example by including ornamental Unicode characters (☻♂♖♥★, etc.) and using HTML tags to change the color and/or size.

Length
Please try to keep signatures short, because very long signatures cloud up the page source in edit mode, making it harder for other editors to find where your comment stopped. Both images and long signatures carry the danger of giving undue prominence to that user's contribution. Reduce it to the minimum necessary.

Transclusion/template
Avoid using page transclusion or templates for signatures (like those which appear as  , for example). These are avoidable drains on server resources. Transcluded signatures require extra processing and, whenever you do change your signature source, all talk pages you've posted on must be re-cached. One can imagine the impact if these kinds of signatures were in common use. Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems.

If you really must use a userpage as a source of boilerplate for your signature, at least substitute it so it is only transcluded once, for example  . RMF 06:31, 22 April 2006 (UTC)