Talk:New requirements for user signatures/Help

The toolforge tool mishandles HTML entities. Additional alternate account links are allowed.

Hello. My alternate account Ltrtst has a signature containing links to both user accounts, for transparency reasons. It is currently considered invalid according to the toolforge tool. Was this use case overlooked, or is it the expected behaviour?

I know I could “just” unlink the disallowed part, but it seems suboptimal.

The extraneous brackets are confusing the Wikitext parsing library into not considering [[[Utilisateur:Ltrtst|Ltrtst]]] to be a wikilink. (Everything works correctly with them removed, example) The HTML entities are evaluated by MediaWiki after parsing, but I have to evaluate them before parsing. You can safely ignore this false positive.

Great to know, thanks!

I just noticed this message to another user with the error "Your signature links to a different user account." However, the link in the signature belongs to the same user account. Is the error explanation just really badly written or was the message sent in error?

The two links in that signature, [[Gebruiker:FakirNL/Ht]] and [[Overleg gebruiker:FakirNL/Ht]], lead to subpages of the editor's user and user talk pages. toolforge:signatures, the tool used to batch-check signatures, only checks that the link target exactly matches the username. It does not distinguish between subpages and other users.

Okay so it is really badly written.

Why can i not just edit the source and have to use some hair brained tool? And don't force users to change their signature: just support it. Don't pay some evil marketing agency for some stupid rebranding and spend the money on something usefu

l like developers. and why the f could i not complete that comment?

And why the f does the unified login not work? And why did it not warn me that I am editing anonymously, like all edit pages do normally?

• This community chose this style for the default page type for discussions about five years ago.
• If you block "third-party cookies", then SUL doesn't work. The warning that you are logged out is a blue band that looks something like this image.
• Can you think of any good reason why bad HTML (e.g., unclosed tags that change the font for the rest of the page) and violations of common policy standards (e.g., a signature with no links) should be supported in software?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T188200

Wouldn't it be nice that for those users who have their preferences including (custom) sig at Meta to get this global as well so with e.g. a UserNameChange one does not have to change the SigWikiText in those prefs at all wikis, but only in Meta?

It looks like that feature was requested in 2018, at phab:T188200.

Ok thx, I'll have a look there soon

Jonesey95 fixed it

A lot of sections have "There are N ways to fix your signature. You can restore the default signature or fix your signature" which is a little confusing---the way to fix my signature is to fix my signature? I don't have a solution which is why I brought it here. My first thought is "There are N ways to stop receiving the error. You can restore...or fix your signature", but it still feels like "fix" is too vague. Thoughts?

@Jonesey95, @Izno, @AntiCompositeNumber, @anyone else: Does the formatting I've suggested for the contribs link in New requirements for user signatures/Help#No user links look approximately right to you? If there's a "normal" way, then I'd rather suggest that.

Looks fine to me. Using "contributions" is the right choice, as "contribs" might be confusing to newer users.

Agreed. I assume this page will be set for translation?

I assume that a few people will want to translate it, but we need to get it right first. I hate making translators correct my mistakes – such a waste of their time.