GuildWiki talk:Sign your comments/archive 1

Draft
I have transcribed a draft from Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages. Because some of the recommendations on wikipedia differ from the communities ideas. So in order to better facilitate the discussion, and to prevent confusion, I have transcribed over a majority of the article. --Draygo Korvan 14:09, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * The article name sounds like it's only asking me to sign User talk:PanSola... - 14:50, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Well ... I copied the article, including the name (ED: which I messed up in so doing 16:28, 12 June 2006 (CDT)) from wikipedia - and cut out the section that is a bit controversial (even on wikipedia). On wikipedia it is considered a guideline, not a rule. And I dont think we will be using it to ban users here either. --Draygo Korvan 14:56, 12 June 2006 (CDT)

Move

 * 1) Please sign your comments on talk pages
 * 2) Please sign your comments
 * 3) Sign your comments on talk pages
 * 4) Sign your comments
 * 5) Please sign your talk pages (as-is)

I would go for #2, I prefer shorter article names. The user can read into the start of the article to get the whole idea. --Draygo Korvan 15:52, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * I agree, short and to the point. --- Barek (talk &bull; contribs) - 15:54, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Two looks good to me too. (Yay, I used all three versions of the word in that sentance.)  --Rainith 16:06, 12 June 2006 (CDT)

I think 1 is the clearest because it is not immediately obvious that comments are limited to talk pages. However, I have no strong opinions here except to be against #5, which is just wrong. –70.20&#x260e; 16:14, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * You need to jump over to wikipedia and tell them they are wrong =P. There are exceptions to the comments limited to talk pages rule. Discussion pages (for instance) can be signed. --Draygo Korvan 16:18, 12 June 2006 (CDT)


 * WP uses Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages, which I think is fine. I have no idea whythe old here linked to that oddly named article –70.20&#x260e; 16:25, 12 June 2006 (CDT)


 * Yea your right, messed up =P. --Draygo Korvan 16:27, 12 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Seems like Karlos moved the page on us siting that we shouldnt use Please because Please is assumed...--Draygo Korvan 10:16, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Yeah the "Please" was bugging me quite a bit too. Glad he removed it. - 10:17, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Sorta bugs me that he did it under the radar, and didnt even bother updating the unsigned template. --Draygo Korvan 10:18, 14 June 2006 (CDT)


 * Karlos was unaware there was even a discussion about it. :) I would recommend people use the move tag if they wanna indicate the page's name itself is in question. Qhen I looked at the page nothing told me there was any discussion about the name. I admittedly did not check the talk page, but I think I had no reason to do that. Anyways, the please is not right. If you guys wanna move it to "Sign your talk pages postS" or "Don't forget to sign messages you leave in talk pages of articles" then by all means. But all the other policies have short, concise titles, not verbose descriptive ones. We call it "You are Valuable" and not "Your contributions are really valuable to us." don't say in 5 words what you can say in 3. :) --Karlos 10:59, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * We did use the move tag, check the history of the article, it was removed when I moved the page. --Draygo Korvan 11:08, 14 June 2006 (CDT)

Additional rule discussion
I'm going to put up for discussion various issues that we should address in the guideline. Ill start with the ones that will be more agreeable, and move down to the ones that have the potential to have more debate. The first two will concern external links and byte (character) limit for sigs. --Draygo Korvan 11:08, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * The use of transclusions in sigs has been brought up in the past, and is used by some users currently. Should we also add a vote on if transclusions should be allowed in signature pages? --- Barek (talk &bull; contribs) - 15:29, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * At the moment, I wouldnt. I would prefer to get somethings out of the way that are less controversial. --Draygo Korvan 15:34, 14 June 2006 (CDT)

Propose immediate termination of all votes in this section.
We are currently lacking an argument for having these votes in the first place. What justifies this instruction creep? What grievance does it address? What benefit will adding new rules add to the day to day activities of this wiki? Until these are addressed satisfactorily, no voting should happen. &mdash; Stabber &#x270d; 09:48, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * We should have these instructions before someone proves us that we need them by making something awfull with their sig. A length limitation would be nice for easier editing anyway and we allready have one sig a lot shorter because of this vote. --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] 09:56, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Disagree. Until we have a "signature incident", we should have no guidelines about it. Fear of the future does not justify restrictions on the present. &mdash; Stabber &#x270d; 09:58, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Well, this is not important to me, but I think that atleast some sort of rules are in place. --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] 10:01, 15 June 2006 (CDT)


 * 1) Grievance it addresses is possible abuse of signatures. Including sinatures that are longer in the edit page than the actual message they are typing
 * 2) Adding the rules now would be far easier in the future. If they do not exist now it will be far more difficult in the future to push a change through if users are abusing it. And when a change gets through in the future you could have alot of legacy problems further complicating the situation. Less risk for abuse in the future, avoids people abusing personal links to increase their pagerank, avoids possible url takeovers in legacy links in signatures.
 * 3) No one should be banned for any of the rules being placed here, these should be guidelines and not hard and fast rules.

If we wait till we need them, it can be too late, we will spend days if not weeks discussing this while the potenital abuse is going on. It is better to get it out of the way now then when needed. --Draygo Korvan 10:02, 15 June 2006 (CDT)


 * There has never in the history of the GuildWiki been an actual "abuse of signatures". Therefore your fear of possible abuse is unjustified. Also a fear is not a grievance. Adding new rules is easy, but rules that are not policed are worse than rules that don't exist. And I would be adamantly opposed to policing any signature rules until we have had a major incident. I find your fearmongering about signatures downright silly, if not expressly antidemocratic. &mdash; Stabber &#x270d; 10:07, 15 June 2006 (CDT)


 * As unusual at it may seem, I am 100% behind Stabber on this one. These votes serve no useful purpose, and solve no present problem. All it does is add complication to something that should be very simple. I firmly believe in only regulating what actually needs to be regulated, not trying to pre-empt any and all possible problems that may or may not arise in the future. And if anyone thinks that, for instance, my signature is too long, please just tell me instead of beating around the bush. -- [[Image:Bishop_icon2.png]] Bishop [ rap|con ] 10:08, 15 June 2006 (CDT)

Proposed Rule:
Permit or disallow external links in user signatures.

Votes

 * Permit
 * Sign here to allow external links in user signatures


 * Disallow
 * Draygo Korvan Signatures should not be allowed to have any external links in them.
 * &mdash; Skuld
 * --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 17:13, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * --Xasxas256
 * --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]]

Discussion
I just want to confirm something here, so correct me if I am wrong. External links is outside of the wiki. This seems self-evident to me, but hey, I've been wrong before. --Rainith 19:24, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Yes, external links are outside the wiki. For instance if I link [www.google.com] in my sig that would be an external link. --Draygo Korvan 09:35, 15 June 2006 (CDT)

Proposed Rule:
Signatures are limited to X number of characters not including the timestamp, or the actual link to the user's page ( User name  doesn't count towards the limit, but if the piped link is modified to be longer, the extended lengh would count).

Votes

 * For
 * e^(pi), rounded up character limit
 * - 15:16, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * 50 character limit
 * --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] (I could accept 100 if wanted)
 * 100 character limit
 * Draygo Korvan
 * 150 character limit
 * Sign here to support
 * 200 character limit
 * --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 17:13, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * (fill in) character limit
 * Sign here to support
 * Against
 * Sign here to oppose

Discussion
e^(pi) ~= 23.1406926. That seems a bit low Pansola. Heck my current sig would then be in violation =p. --Draygo Korvan 15:37, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Is this vote regarding displayed characters, or characters of code? Mine is already 214 characters if you're counting characters in the code, but only 27 actually displayed characters.  If I had a graphic in mine (many users do have one), it would be even longer in characters of code. --- Barek (talk &bull; contribs) - 15:45, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * I'm against cluttering of the edit buffer. - 15:49, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * It would be code. As in when i click edit it shouldnt be more than X characters long. Though you can shrink yours quite a bit by attacking those &amp;nbsp; in addition it doesnt count the actual datestamp. Yours is actually only 142 characters long--Draygo Korvan 15:51, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Oops, my mistake, mine is only 142 in code. I was counting all characters in my sig file, forgetting that some of it was inside a noinclude tag. --- Barek (talk &bull; contribs) - 15:53, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * if you cut out your &amp;nbsp; your sig looks like this, shortening it even more:

--- Barek (talk &bull; contribs) -
 * --Draygo Korvan 15:55, 14 June 2006 (CDT)

I just modified what counts and what doesn't. For example, Draygo Korvan's sig would count as 0 characters, and Barek's after removing the nbsp's would be under 100 characters. - 15:56, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Ill second that change, and move my vote to 100 chars, which I think is reasonable.--Draygo Korvan 16:01, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * I think that change is making it even more hoops to jump through. And twisting the rules to squeeze specific existing signatures in seems downright silly. I much prefer a nice, basic guideline of "Please do not make you signature terribly long and/or complicated." -- [[Image:Bishop_icon2.png]] Bishop [ rap|con ] 16:09, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * I don't understand. The change gaurentees everyone, regardless of the length of their user name, to start from the same place (basically, the vanilla sig count as 0).  How is that silly or twisting things? - 16:19, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * That part isn't twisting anything. It is merely needlessly complicated, and it encourages those who want long, silly signatures to choose long, silly usernames, which would be of no use to anyone. -- [[Image:Bishop_icon2.png]] Bishop [ rap|con ] 16:25, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Hmmm, I had a reason at one time for inserting the &nbsp, but it seems to work fine without them, so I've cleaned it up. Gets it down to 114.  I'll still need to modify further to get it under 100, but should be do-able.  Still, I don't think 150 or even 200 is outrageously long myself. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 16:59, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Edit: Okay, I have it under 90 now (after subtracting out the timestamp and standard piped link to the user page), thanks for the suggestions. However, I do believe that the transclusion question should be addressed at the same time as the sig length.  Users can easilly bypass the length limits by using a short transclusion link, so the two are related to some degree.  --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 18:29, 14 June 2006 (CDT)

Mine's nice and short :p &mdash; Skuld  15:57, 14 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Anyone care to tell me how short mine is? I don't have my name in it or a link to my user page, I only have the image which is a redirect to my user page? Even if every character is counted, it is very short. :) --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] 04:27, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Well here's a good test to see if the average idiot on the street can work it out :) Looking at it: --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] I'm not sure! Ok it works out to 27 characters long and --Gem would obviously be your vanilla sig. However you current sig only includes the -- and none of the rest. So do we say your sig is 27 characters long or do we say it's 25 (27-2=25, the 2 comes from the two hypens) characters long? I'd say the vanilla sig includes not just the User name and timestamp, it also includes the two hyphens ie the -- as well. So I'm going with 25 characters. Perhaps the proposed rule should be modified to also include the two hyphens. So either way it is pretty short but it's still more than e^(pi) Gem!!! You might have to change the image name :) --Xasxas256 07:49, 15 June 2006 (CDT)


 * If it would matter I would feel worngly treaten here. Someone with a longer sig counts as 0 when I count for 25 because I replaced my name with an image. :D --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] 09:11, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Gem you would get 18 free characters (not including timestamp at all here). So your sig by the rules would only be (27-18) 9 characters long =). I think Pamsola's addition isnt confusing though we can type it out more plainly. Basically you are limited to x characters beyond the regular sig. --Draygo Korvan 09:33, 15 June 2006 (CDT)
 * Ah, I understand. --[[Image:Gem-icon-sm.png]] 09:57, 15 June 2006 (CDT)