Topic on Talk:New requirements for user signatures

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.