Signature Policy (redux)

[Jioruji Derako]

Last discussion sort of died out and rolled off the page, so I feel it's worth bringing up again.

Despite discussions and ideas, nothing ever turned into a policy; we still have massive signatures here and there, signatures with more images then letters in them, bright and distracting animated ones... and plenty of templated ones, which fix the problem of coding taking up half the page, but pose the new problem of straining the servers. What would it take for at least a guideline to be implemented?

Here's a rough draft of some basic "rules", based off what I know and what I remember from the last thread.

*No templates, unless it's a subst: template. Reason being, signatures get used on tons of pages; any one user can easily have his or her signature on upwards of a hundred pages at once. They decide to change their signature on a whim? Server has to update upwards of a hundred pages. Needless to say, this can cause lag or server crashes. Which is why it's a general no-no.

*Limit to the number of images in a signature to somewhere around one or two. There's not much need for images in the first place; they're just there to make your signature brighter and more colorful. Which is a problem, when your signature is the brightest and most colorful thing on the page. Makes it tough to read the actual comments.

*Text size limit. Haven't seen this used yet, but no doubt someone will think of it. Font size=10 in your signature, and suddenly your simple signature takes up two or three lines of text. Keep it the default size, no <big> tags, and be sparing with the <small> ones too (although that's not as important).

*Coding limit. If your signature's coding takes up more then, say, three lines of text in the edit window (1024x768 resolution), then you're probably using too much stuff. Keep it simple; the signature is supposed to tell people who posted what, not who posted what +their favorite color, favorite pokemon, birthday, and WiFi friend code.

*Image size limit. This one's sort of a no-brainer with the text size limit. If your signature features a 50x50 pixel image of Absol, then that's probably bigger then your whole comment right there. Images can be resized easily, so keep them at about 19 pixels high (that's the height of the text, generally).

*Most importantly, the signature needs to reflect the user correctly. My username's Jioruji Derako; I could sign as "Jioruji Derako", "Jio Derako", "Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako", maybe even "J. Derako", but if I signed as "Absol fan number 1", that doesn't do anyone any good at all. Zhen Lin's got a good example; it may be in Kanji, but it's his name. I don't think anyone could look at that signature and not know who it is (partly because of his status as well). It's unique, easy to spot on a page, and takes up less space and coding then half of my signature.

I may be coming across as a bit of a spoilsport here, a fun-killer, but it's not intentional. I'm not suggesting an iron-fisted policy, just a guideline one; if someone's signature takes up exactly three lines of text in coding, that's not a big deal. If it's three characters over the limit, eh. Who cares. But if someone has a signature with five animated images in it, rainbow-colored text, and a name that isn't even theirs, it would be nice to have a policy to point to and say "hey, could you please try to follow these guidelines? Your current signature is really confusing and distracting."

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[Tina]

*No templates, unless it's a subst: template. Reason being, signatures get used on tons of pages; any one user can easily have his or her signature on upwards of a hundred pages at once. They decide to change their signature on a whim? Server has to update upwards of a hundred pages. Needless to say, this can cause lag or server crashes. Which is why it's a general no-no.

...plus, Bulba's servers aren't the greatest servers in the first place that and using templates make the Bulbasaur get diarrhea... some of you will get the joke here >_> and... well, I must say though, that I stopped using the Bulbasaur-abusing templates, and yet I'm still not very satisfied with the coding. Driving me insane.

Also, I think the <small> tags aren't as much as a problem as the <big> tags are. But that's just me, haha.

"Images can be resized easily, so keep them at about 19 pixels high"-- ...wait, but what about the MS images that are oh-so-popular to use? At most, the animated 'slightly bouncing' popular ones are at 32x32px, but eh.

Number one pet peeve I have for signatures. EMERALD ANIMATIONS. Dammit, those are huge and distracting, and seeing the images stack up on the page-- ahhhh! Why do people use theeem!? *twitch*

...otherwise, I think we're pretty much good here...

 

[Sketch]

I agree with everything in this thread.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

"Images can be resized easily, so keep them at about 19 pixels high"-- ...wait, but what about the MS images that are oh-so-popular to use? At most, the animated 'slightly bouncing' popular ones are at 32x32px, but eh.

Well, the coding to resize an image is fairly simple.

[[image:randomsprite.png|19x19px]]

Just adding that little bit to the end of the code there will resize the image, which is generally the best way to go for signatures. Original image size won't matter at all in that case, so you could use gigantic sprites if you liked (although to be fair they'd look like crap resized that drastically).
Simple coding like that is easy to explain, and probably a perfect fix for quite a few "problem signatures".

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[Theryguy512]

Last discussion sort of died out and rolled off the page, so I feel it's worth bringing up again.

Despite discussions and ideas, nothing ever turned into a policy; we still have massive signatures here and there, signatures with more images then letters in them, bright and distracting animated ones... and plenty of templated ones, which fix the problem of coding taking up half the page, but pose the new problem of straining the servers. What would it take for at least a guideline to be implemented?

Here's a rough draft of some basic "rules", based off what I know and what I remember from the last thread.

*No templates, unless it's a subst: template. Reason being, signatures get used on tons of pages; any one user can easily have his or her signature on upwards of a hundred pages at once. They decide to change their signature on a whim? Server has to update upwards of a hundred pages. Needless to say, this can cause lag or server crashes. Which is why it's a general no-no.

*Limit to the number of images in a signature to somewhere around one or two. There's not much need for images in the first place; they're just there to make your signature brighter and more colorful. Which is a problem, when your signature is the brightest and most colorful thing on the page. Makes it tough to read the actual comments.

*Text size limit. Haven't seen this used yet, but no doubt someone will think of it. Font size=10 in your signature, and suddenly your simple signature takes up two or three lines of text. Keep it the default size, no <big> tags, and be sparing with the <small> ones too (although that's not as important).

*Coding limit. If your signature's coding takes up more then, say, three lines of text in the edit window (1024x768 resolution), then you're probably using too much stuff. Keep it simple; the signature is supposed to tell people who posted what, not who posted what +their favorite color, favorite pokemon, birthday, and WiFi friend code.

*Image size limit. This one's sort of a no-brainer with the text size limit. If your signature features a 50x50 pixel image of Absol, then that's probably bigger then your whole comment right there. Images can be resized easily, so keep them at about 19 pixels high (that's the height of the text, generally).

*Most importantly, the signature needs to reflect the user correctly. My username's Jioruji Derako; I could sign as "Jioruji Derako", "Jio Derako", "Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako", maybe even "J. Derako", but if I signed as "Absol fan number 1", that doesn't do anyone any good at all. Zhen Lin's got a good example; it may be in Kanji, but it's his name. I don't think anyone could look at that signature and not know who it is (partly because of his status as well). It's unique, easy to spot on a page, and takes up less space and coding then half of my signature.

I may be coming across as a bit of a spoilsport here, a fun-killer, but it's not intentional. I'm not suggesting an iron-fisted policy, just a guideline one; if someone's signature takes up exactly three lines of text in coding, that's not a big deal. If it's three characters over the limit, eh. Who cares. But if someone has a signature with five animated images in it, rainbow-colored text, and a name that isn't even theirs, it would be nice to have a policy to point to and say "hey, could you please try to follow these guidelines? Your current signature is really confusing and distracting."

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

Yep, this seems to cover everything that we talked about. I highly agree with this.

 

[TTEchidna]

"Images can be resized easily, so keep them at about 19 pixels high"-- ...wait, but what about the MS images that are oh-so-popular to use? At most, the animated 'slightly bouncing' popular ones are at 32x32px, but eh.

The animated minisprites should be fine with one, maybe two, per sig. They don't expand the line too much from what I can see, and help me to identify the end line of a comment before reading all the way across. I'd say a limit of twice the size of the text itself would be best. So... 40x40, but no bigger.

 

[Theryguy512]

The animated minisprites should be fine with one, maybe two, per sig. They don't expand the line too much from what I can see, and help me to identify the end line of a comment before reading all the way across. I'd say a limit of twice the size of the text itself would be best. So... 40x40, but no bigger.

What about Trozei sprites? Are they bigger than that?

 

[Tina]

Nope, they're 32x32. Which... is the same as the animated ones, I believe.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

The animated minisprites should be fine with one, maybe two, per sig. They don't expand the line too much from what I can see, and help me to identify the end line of a comment before reading all the way across. I'd say a limit of twice the size of the text itself would be best. So... 40x40, but no bigger.

Do you mean 40 pixels wide, high, or both? A signature that's 40px high would look awful, if you think about it.
19x<insert random number here> should be fine, it's not the width that matters but the height. At 19px high, any image will fit perfectly into the text without problems. We'll probably want a width limit, so people don't upload signature images that are 19x1024 (full-screen width)... but aside from that, it's not an important limit.

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

:EDIT:
Slightly more then 19px would work fine, so long as it doesn't stretch the text too much. 32x32 still leaves some extra space around the text, but it's not a big deal. That's a part of the policy that can be figured out as time goes on, I think. Important thing is that people don't use the full-size sprites and whatnot in their signatures.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

Bump.

More and more users have their signatures in templates; these signatures are too big without the template, which is all the more reason NOT to use a template as your signature (bigger signature = harder to load). And looking at RecentChanges and seeing some users making lots of edits to their signatures? Even worse. The site already loads really slowly at times, it doesn't need the strain of having to update that many pages all at once.

For example, Userokemaniac102's signature. Really the only bad part of it is that it's a template; the coding takes up a big chunk, but that's not too hard to fix, and not as big a problem as the template.
Take a look at this link. That's a list of every page that includes Pokemaniac's signature (basically, every page he's ever posted on). Whenever he edits his signature - even if he's just changing text color - the server has to also update all ~400 pages he's got his signature on.
It might not sound all that bad; it's only one user doing it, and he doesn't change his signature too often, right? But that's the problem. It's not just one user (Pokemaniac is just the first example I could find). And there's tons of room for abuse as well. Let's say someone accidentally edits Pokemaniac's signature template. But adds a whole userpage's worth of coding. Now, that single userpage is duplicated ~400 times over. Server lag will be expected... at the least. Worse yet, people could do this on purpose.

If I know this stuff, then other people do too. And all it takes is one angry/accidental/misplaced edit to mess up ~400 pages. I think at the very least, some sort of guideline instructing users not to use templates in signatures is in order. It's easy to enforce as well; simply delete signature pages if a user tries to make a template of it (thus removing the problem altogether). I don't expect most users to enjoy having to remake signatures; it's never cool to have to "throw away" a cool nametag like that. But I think setting rules like this in place now, before too many people will be affected, is the better option.

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[Zhen Lin]

... wow, and suddenly it clicks. I've been wondering why the job queue is always having a few entries nowadays - it must be due to all these stupid signature-templates. Each time a template is edited, it causes a cascade of link updates that get piled onto the job queue.

 

[Tina]

Dammit, I've been trying to tell people that and yet they're all just 'NO IT DOESN'T IT DOESN'T PUT ANY STRESS ON THE SERVER PLUS IT'S A SHORT CODE WHAT ELSE IS BAD D8'.

...

On second thought, I should probably slap myself since I think I started this mess. ._____.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

@Zhen Lin: Hmm, and I think I just learned what the job queue is. That thing confused me.
Bulbapedia has a lot of templates; the heavily used ones are protected, as they should be (stuff like {{m|Thunderbolt}} and {{p|Pikachu}} are protected)... but I'd say user signatures can be even more used (Pokemaniac's signature template is on ~400 pages, and a few other users actually beat that), and you can't quite protect those without defeating the purpose of them. That right there is the problem.

@Tina: Eh, it's a hard thing to simply "explain" to users; without going into technical detail, at least. I personally find it much, much easier to believe things when I see it happen; but you can't quite go telling users "count to five and try to load the site again, I'm going to prove to you how much strain your signature puts on the servers".

I don't think you could technically say you or anyone else started this; it's something that's been around for a while. Go to your preferences and try to set your signature to "{{User:Tina}}". Notice that when you save, it'll turn it into "{{SUBST:User:Tina}}". That's built-in to MediaWiki, to stop stuff like this. Obviously there's ways around this, but still, the idea of "oh, wouldn't it be so much easier if I templated my signature?" has been around for a long time.

On that note, if someone wants to write up their signature on a seperate page, then SUBST: it into their signature, that's perfectly fine. It'll just fill in the template's coding, rather then the template itself, so changing the template won't change all the signatures. But people with gigantic signatures will have to deal with their gigantic coding in that manner.

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[TTEchidna]

The signatures can be even more used, certainly, but 400+ pages isn't much compared to the 5000+ pages that {{p}}'s on.

I do know I once used a template-in-a-template signature to prevent the mediawikiing of it, but I now see that that was a baaaad idea. I kinda had that "oh shit" moment when I realized that it was more or less the same as the LTs... which was pretty soon after I had the "oh shit" moment of seeing all of them unprotected...

So... in closing, yes to no template sigs. And honestly, I dunno why everyone needs all the colors, either.

So, should we announce to everyone that they should start subst:ing their signature template into the pages it's on so that we can delete the templates themselves, after they make a new, not code-heavy signature? Meaning, fit it on one line or we'll come after you.

 

[Lilac Hill]

A simple sig, like mine or yours TTE, would surely be just as good as these fancy sigs I see around.

 

[Jioruji Derako]

Doesn't need to be all on one line, it can be two lines or so. (keep in mind that all depends on screen resolution.) So long as the signature isn't longer then the average comment, then it's probably good. If you need to dig through signature coding on a talk page just to reply, then it's too long.
Length limit I see is generally three lines of text at 800x600 resolution, which is more then enough for a fancy, non-disruptive signature.

Only thing I'm thinking about is, what happens when we delete old signature templates? Lots of red links... I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to put the SUBST: right into the template, so it automatically SUBST:'s the coding, no matter what. You could instantly fix every signature in one shot if you figured out how to add a code like that to a signature template, which would make the templates safe to delete. (might cause a ton of lag doing it though, so who knows.)

Here, a few other signature policies on other wikis... good to base off of.
GuildWiki
GuildWarsWiki
Look near the bottom of both of those policies for the stuff about customizing your signature. More important things are "use colors sparingly" and "avoid changing your signature often".

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako

 

[White Len]

Okay...signature redo time. =(

Okay, so exactly HOW do we get the message across to those users?

And yes, I agree with you on the deleting. Its precisely that fact why User:Optimus35/sig is still hanging around. Have you tried {{<includeonly>SUBST:</includeonly>User:WhateverMyNameIs}}?

 

[Zhen Lin]

Well... to enforce rules there need to be penalties.

Either that, or a way to forcefully change the signatures of offenders. But that isn't possible with a standard MediaWiki install, so I guess the only penalty we could impose is a temporary ban...

 

[Virtual-Z]

I think I could get along with these rules. It has 4 links though (well, one's broken now because I got it deleted and can't change it), and I have two simple animations.

 

[Zhen Lin]

By edict I hereby declare this new policy:
1. All signatures will be text-only and not exceed 80 characters on-screen when rendered.
2. No line breaks.
3. The font size of the signature will be no larger than the font size of normal text.
4. No signature templates.
5. A link to the user page, at minimum, and a link to the user talk page is recommended.

I also appoint Jioruji Derako to enforce this policy.

There is to be no further discussion of this topic for 30 days.