Forum:Signature policy

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— I dreamed last night... I got on the boat to Heaven!

_{And by some chance, I had brought my dice along! — 02:20, December 12, 2010 (UTC)}

As I have discovered from reviewing the results and forum-condemned brackets of the Kingdom Hearts Wiki's "The Keyblade War" tournament, I am noticing a difficulty in checking signatures to make sure they are non-anon (by signature), as well as with reading the votes and signatures. Many signatures are extremely elaborate, with flashing colors and graphics, use incredibly large images that actually force the line of text to be larger, which looks terrible and breaks continuity in writing/conversation, and/or does not display the name of the user directly or at all, instead forcing the reader to leave the page in order to see who the user is.

As we continue to develop in our creativity and... ~~elegancy~~ brutality of graphics in our signatures, which has done nothing but become very overbearing and disruptive over the last few months, I am proposing a signature policy for the Kingdom Hearts Wiki. Now, before I begin, this wiki is going to become a practical fansite, so this may not apply to the contributors or viewers that solely read and do not contribute to discussion or editing of the wiki productively... which sadly is an actual percentage of the wiki that cannot be ignored. However, this policy, if agreed upon, will be taken to the new Kingdom Hearts Wiki and carried out there.

This policy almost directly mirrors the Final Fantasy Wiki's policy on signatures. The reason? Compare how clean their tournament brackets are to ours in terms of the signatures' brutality, nuisance-like qualities, ability to tell who the author is, and the numbers of breaks in lines due to obtrusive images:

FFWiki:

KHWiki:

Please leave your comments and proposals that may be required to make this policy an agreeable one. Personally, I am absolutely tired of having to click on a user's signature, which sometimes forces you have to even go through the annoying and unnecessary trouble of finding the link in the signature, to see who wrote the corresponding message. Seeing pictures and characters that are tall, large, and aren't needed to simply say "I WROTE THIS" is aesthetically unpleasing and do not settle well with me either.

Lastly, I already discussed this with several KHWiki IRC-goers, and we all found this to be an acceptable policy we can benefit from. We all importantly agreed that while signatures are a form of user expression, expression does not require being obtrusive and disruptive with what you use to display yourself.

Proposed Policy

All signatures must clearly display the username of the posting user. Since this is the English Kingdom Hearts Wiki, all signatures must also use a Latin script (A, B, C... X, Y, Z) to display the user name.
For those of you with creative Japanese signatures, these will still be allowed, so long as your usual user name has already been written out in Latin characters.

Abridging is fine, so long as the author of the comment is still obvious.

All signatures must be followed or include a timestamp. This is not a large issue since this is already being done for the most part, but without a timestamp, we cannot tell when a discussion has taken place, and therefore its relevance/acknowledgment of other related discussions.

NO MORE UNNECESSARILY AND OBNOXIOUSLY LARGE IMAGES. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. Images must fit within the size parameters of the text, which is 15px. This shall be the limit for image size.

All signatures must link to at least the central user page of the posting user, i.e. not their "Userpage+" or user sub-page. Those can be linked to as well, of course, but the central user page is a necessity.

Comments

SilverCrono ^{Well, I can tell who you are.} — "Looks like you're prepared."

_{"What is with you and picking up stray puppies?" — 02:26, December 12, 2010 (UTC)}

As Doorsey said, this policy already happened at the FFwiki. I approved of it there, and I approve of it here. Obnoxious sigs are obnoxious, and annoyed Crono is annoyed.

Chitalian8 ^Say...— Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves.

_{Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 02:30, December 12, 2010 (UTC)}

I approve of this policy. Also, certain signatures have are missing tags, this one comes to mind. It turns all of the following text into that font.

I'm for this policy, and I think you covered probably the most important points. It reminds me of the HRWiki signature policy, which seems a reasonable guideline for signatures. --Neumannz, The Dark Falcon 02:31, December 12, 2010 (UTC)

KrytenKoro - "Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
TALK -

Images need to be in-line, yeah that makes sense. Timestamp is automatic, as long as you use all four tildes.

However, that the signature most contain your username. Even on the ffwiki, I'm seeing a lot of people just signing with initials, or some other thing. Also, as long as your signature links to your talk page (something I can agree on), you just have to mouseover the link, or if you are editing, the name is there.

I can agree with the changes made to prevent disrupting the page, and to make sure you are accessible, but I can't agree with telling everyone "Your signature has to be "username timestamp".

maggosh ^{The steel is forged...} — "Souls as far as the eye can see..."

_{"If you want light to rule over all, then you must rid the world of everything else."}

Neither can I. I side with Kryten on this.

					Soxra - The only blind person at Christmastime is he who has not Christmas in his heart. Christmas talk! - Soxxeh 02:33, December 12, 2010







					Agreed 100%, particularly about the super-high images. I've also noticed the few signatures that are completely generic. It borders on an unsigned vote, in the case of TKW. (Except images can be up to 17px high, unless the line is affected by <small> or another text-size change.) Chitalian, usually that isn't an issue if the CORRECT tags are left open. Signatures almost always have a newline after them, which cuts off all the formatting from bleeding into other posts. But I do think there should be a policy against this as most people aren't sure what the CORRECT tags are. Also, I agree with Kryten's points. As long as there's a link to the user page, initials or nicknames should be okay.