Talk:New requirements for user signatures

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It's the end of March. I think the Editing team has all the information they need for this stage, but they are not in a hurry. If you've got comments/questions/ideas, please keep posting. Expect to see a bit more (e.g., perhaps a timeline) in the next few weeks.

On the community side, I think the main tasks will be:

• updating any help pages (if your community has a page saying that you can do something that will no longer work), and
• asking editors with soon-to-be-invalid signatures to update them. In some wikis, this is just a couple of people, and in others, we'll want to use Special:MassMessage.

Also, Thank you. There's a lot of good information in these discussions, and I really appreciate it.

I've only just been notified about this (through the WP Administrators' Newsletter) today, 1st April. I see comments are required before 31st March. How was that meant to work?

This was announced in Tech News, and on your home wiki, at the Village pump (technical) and the bot operators' noticeboard. If you are interested in technical matters, including software changes that affect non-technical users, I recommend subscribing to (and then actually readinng) Tech News each week. I appreciate the help of anyone who decided to share the links further, but naturally the WMF doesn't control their publication schedule.

As for the stated deadline, it was an estimate of when the devs would actually be able to work on this. As you can see from my earlier comment, they're busy with other things this week, so there's no need to stop providing information just because of the earlier estimate. The "real" deadline is a few seconds before they start coding.

This is not a technical matter. It potentially affects all users. The issue may have a technical solution, but that is no reason to hide it in tech related venues. I'm not going to sign up to tech newsletters just in case something comes up. When you are at the stage of calling for comments, a watchlist notice would be appropriate.

Solutions to almost all technical problems have the potential to affect all users, e.g., by making it harder, easier, faster, or slower to use the sites. The problems addressed here are:

1. invalid HTML,
2. accurate machine detection of signatures, and
3. how to parse signatures that contain certain characters (i.e., how to turn what's stored in the database into HTML that your web browser can understand).

These all sound like technical problems to me.

Just a note that the link to your user/talk/contributions page can be invisible, and this works fine and is accepted. Maybe this can be added to the main text. See my signature here, which visibly only links to my home wiki, but contains an invisible link to my local user page to satisfy the needs of MediaWiki: – gpvos (talk)User:Gpvos 16:38, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

We have an essay on the English Wikipedia called en:Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose that covers potential instructions like this. I do not think that putting information like this on the page would be helpful.

I agree that this is a bug rather than a feature, and as such, it shouldn’t be documented as a feature. I’m not sure if it can reasonably be fixed, but at least we shouldn’t advertise it.

A similar method has been mentioned on nl:Wikipedia:Gepersonaliseerde handtekening since August 2020. The recommendation there is to use [[User:YourName|‍]]. So there is at least one more editor who doesn't consider this to be stuffing beans up one's nose. – gpvos (talk)User:Gpvos 12:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T272322

Hello, all:

To make the Reply tool more reliable, they'd like to introduce another requirement: Signatures should not include a line break.

This mostly appears in messages with fake signatures posted by Extension:MassMessage, but those generally shouldn't be replied to.

I plan to post a description on the main page, but for right now: Do you know of any editor who uses a multi-line signature? I've seen very few, and almost all of those have turned out to be a typo/accidental stray character.

I can't recall ever seeing one. I'm assuming that this is related to task T272667.

Me neither. If this requirement gets accepted/implemented, it would be nice if AntiCompositeNumber’s signature checker checked it.

I've added a description at New requirements for user signatures#Additional proposal (2021). On my end, there's no rush.

Signatures now includes a default check for line breaks, defined as \n <br> <div> <p>. There are 23 occurrences on enwiki. Most seem to be accidental or otherwise what we're trying to prohibit, but there are a few like Ahecht who are using it to stack text inside their signature. That's still probably problematic, and should be done differently.

@Matma Rex will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that <br> (if it's typed as the HTML code, not if it's typed by pressing ↵ Enter) is okay.

Yes

Should it be though?

Maybe it shouldn't, but it's not causing any issues for DiscussionTools or other existing software. There are many stupider things you can put in your signature, and I don't want us to get bogged in discussions about what should or shouldn't be allowed, which is bound to happen if we propose anything remotely controversial.

We went ahead with making this change, and it will be deployed this week. If your signature contains a line break, you'll see a warning message in preferences, similar to how the other requirements are handled right now:

Your current signature is invalid. Although you can still use it, you won't be able to change it until you correct it.

Your signature must consist of a single line of wikitext.

This change is included in 1.37.0-wmf.3, which is being deployed this week. It'll reach Wikipedias this Thursday, 29 April, assuming everything goes well.

@Matma Rex and @AntiCompositeNumber, please see https://signatures.toolforge.org/check/it.wikipedia.org/Francesco%20Ippolito I don't know whether this is wrong or just appears wrong, but if feels like a bad idea even if it should be "legal".

Looks like the user was renamed, see . Everything redirects to the current username, but it boils down to the same old problem of renamed users not updating their signatures.

That seems like a local issue to me. This might be a renamed user and hence valid. It does appear wrong, though, and I would not personally encourage it.

Is there ever a use case for this? Maybe I have two accounts, and use the same sig template for both?

From w:en:Wikipedia talk:Signatures#Length section:

Right now, the maximum length for a custom signature is 255 characters (or 255 bytes?). This is already enforced by the software.

However, if your custom sig is {{subst:my-sig-template}}, then right now, that's "25 characters", even if the template contains the entire text of Homer's Odyssey.

My question for you: Do you all want me to ask for them to start checking the length of signature templates? There's no software need for this (that I know of), but if this is something that editors want, then I'm willing to make the request.

A template that contains the entire text of Homer's Odyssey will break the page. So yes, please ask to check the length of signature template.

My sig (on en:wp) is a link to a subpage of my userpage, which then redirects to my userpage. I was advised that it is probably against the new rules, but it is unclear. It states "but a signature that includes only links to another wiki, or only redirects from a former username, will be invalid". But my signature does not contain only links to another wiki or username, and in fact contains no links to another wiki or username. It is a local link to a subpage of my userpage. So it is not clear to me that this runs afoul of the new rules. Please advise. --w:User:Lethe 2601:19B:C00:A55:9492:14C4:BD6A:3D09 18:23, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

@Lethe Your signature must contain a link to User:Lethe, User talk:Lethe, or Special:Contributions/Lethe. You can add links to whatever else you would like, but it must link to one of those pages. I do not believe MediaWiki considers redirects when validating signatures, but I haven't tested it. You can test it yourself by making a change to your signature and trying to save it. For best results, you should link directly to your user page, user talk page, or contributions. Oh, and by the way, you're editing logged-out.

You can check what the software thinks about your existing signature in your preferences – if it would become invalid, you'll see a warning message in the Signature section.

My practical advice (after reading the message on your talk page where you explain that this is for tracking your mentions on Special:WhatLinksHere) is to have one "normal" link (perhaps the talk page one) to satisfy these requirements, and one link through the redirect to do your tracking.

I have edited my signature to include a link to my contributions page, which I believe makes it comport with the rules. I'll note that the existence of subst'ed signatures makes the software-imposed compliance check circumventable even for users who are not grandfathered in, like I would've been. If you want a noncompliant signature, simply save your signature preferences with a compliant template, and then edit the template afterwards. Why anyone should want to do this is beyond me, so it may not be worthwhile to make the software check rule it out. w:User:Lethe ~~~~

The requirements are mostly meant to prevent mistakes (e.g. forgetting to link your user page, or messing up the HTML syntax) rather than intentional abuse, so I don't think that's a problem.

Also, in the unspecified future when "all signatures will need to conform", the validity will be checked whenever the signature is used rather than only when it's changed in preferences, so this method won't let you circumvent it. Right now it is only done when changing preferences, since that was the easiest way to "grandfather-in" old signatures.

I see. Thanks for explaining. w:User:Lethe 2601:19B:C00:A55:FC7C:894D:1494:2E8D 18:49, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Subst is now totally useless because it cannot be used to provide the required links to user and talk pages. -- ◄ David L • discuter ► 16:39, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Originally posted by DavidL at Talk:New requirements for user signatures/en

@DavidL "it cannot be used to provide the required links to user and talk pages." is incorrect. You can still substitute a template as your signature, provided that the post-substitution text complies with the technical requirements.

The added requirements around substitution refer to uses of substitution that cause the page text to change in subsequent edits after the signed edit. See phab:T230652.

So there is a bug because it doesn't work.

Works for me.

Thanks for replies. I found why it doesn't worked for me: I was using user namespace in French "Utilisateur". Sorry for this.

But the error message was about the missing link to user page and talk page. It would be more helpful to report error about the non-existence of the page used in subst, to figure out what is the problem.

I think it'd be most helpful if MediaWiki.org recognized all the languages, instead of insisting that its namespaces be written in English. :-)

This change was made about three weeks ago, and the number of active editors with errors seems to have declined during this time. I suspect that this is mostly about new accounts, which can no longer make these mistakes.

I decided today to wait another ~10 days before trying to contact anyone else about fixing their sigs. Especially on the biggest wikis, I don't want to flood RecentChanges with hundreds of messages.

I've started a central help page at New requirements for user signatures/Help. Please put that page on your watchlist (and help me figure out the simplest, easiest ways to explain all of this).

If you use MassMessage to send the notice, RC won't be any more flooded that with, eg, Signpost publications, and the edits should be marked as bot edits and hidden

AntiCompositeNumber’s report for huwiki lists the following signature as not having a user/user talk link (the user page is Szerkesztő:HoremWeb):

[[kép:horemweb.png|HoremWeb|link=Szerkesztő:HoremWeb]] <sup>[[kép:dd-mdw-jn.png|14px|ḏd md.w jn: szavaknak mondása|link=Szerkesztővita:HoremWeb]]</sup>

Is this invalid according to MediaWiki as well, or it’s just the Toolforge tool that doesn’t recognize it? The resulting HTML has a proper <a> tag in it, so I don’t think that the reply tool (or any other tool) should have issues with it.

You know, I have actually never considered that someone's entire signature might be images…

I tested it and it looks like the MediaWiki code recognizes the links, and this signature is valid.

Thanks, I thought for some reason that the deprecation period will start tomorrow, so I didn’t test this myself. So it’s up to AntiCompositeNumber to recognize it in his tool, but this might be quite tricky… Is there a way for Toolforge tools to call a real MediaWiki? It would be a lot easier to simply check for

$validator = new \MediaWiki\PreferencesSignatureValidator(
 $user,
 $context,
 ParserOptions::newFromContext( $context )
);
$signatureErrors = $validator->validateSignature( $signature );

If not, probably this could be exposed as an API (which could be used on Special:Preferences as well to provide nearly real-time feedback about invalid signatures, instead of only on save).

I'd be able to fix it by switching my parsing code from parsing Wikitext to parsing rendered HTML, but I don't really have the time/energy for that at the moment. As a personal opinion, I don't think it should be valid, but that obviously didn't make it into this round.

It is no longer possible to save an invalid custom signature in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal-signature.

Some volunteers have already started encouraging editors at their home wikis to update their signatures. Please let me know if you are doing this, or if you would like to do this. Anyone is welcome to do this – it's very helpful! – but we should not accidentally contact the same editors multiple times.