Multiversal Omnipedia:Signature

Basics

Here's a list of all the signature options:

What you type	What will be stored	What shows on the page
~~~	[[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]]	Kingturtle
~~~~	[[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]] 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)	Kingturtle 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)
~~~~~	04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)	04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

If you chose to contribute to the Multiversal Omnipedia without logging in, the tildes will be converted to your IP address to be displayed as your signature. (An account actually provides you with more anonymity, if you are concerned about IP privacy issues.) You can also consider manually signing your posts with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon (although your IP address will still be stored in the page history if you edit without logging in).

If your preferred signature consists of non-ASCII characters (Chinese for example), you are encouraged to use ASCII characters in them as well. This is because not everyone can view certain characters, and instead may find a box or other replacement where the non-ASCII character would properly be.

Customizing your signature

Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Nickname". The software automatically places "[[User:<yourusername>|" and "]]" around the text entered in this field, so that whatever nickname you choose to use as a signature will be linked to your user page. Although not a policy, it seems to be common practice (and common courtesy) to use a signature name that is either identical or closely related to your account name, or to use your real name.

If you want to use a more complex signature (for instance, including a link to your talk page), you can choose the "Raw signatures (without automatic link)" checkbox in your Preferences. Just fill the "Your nickname" field with your desired signature, exactly as you want it to be substituted for the tildes.

Please note that the inclusion of images, templates or large amounts of content in your signature is discouraged -- it is distracting to many users, puts an unnecessary drain on the servers, and can badly distort the normal display of talk pages (especially if the image link should become broken, or the viewer has images turned off in their browsers).

Note that the talk link is somewhat "disguised" in some signatures -- it might look like a last name, or even the last letter of a name, or a single symbol. Hovering the mouse pointer over the link should tell you (in a tooltip, browser status bar, or other) whether the link is pointing to "User", "User talk", or something else.

Things to avoid

Appearance

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

However, images 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.

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.