Thread:Mathmagician/@comment-188432-20120827220853/@comment-188432-20120828050107

And that's what's so damned annoying about this now. It's not everyone's signature that needs to be policed; it's just whichever one catches your eye. There's no consistent policy, here. I asked Dopp twice for clarification as to what written policy I offended, and of course she refused to answer. Cause there is no answer, and you're very well aware of it. You're also very well aware that I will comply, because I'm a bureaucrat on a reasonably influential wiki and it just wouldn't be seemly for me to be in open rebellion against Wikia Staff.

I didn't need your suggestions. I'm not an idiot. I know how to fix the sig. Obviously if I know what will abort the RTE, I know what will keep it running. I just wanted you to do some of the work, in the hopes that you would eventually see the technical problem with what you were asking me to do. There is no solution which will keep previous signatures looking right. And yet, even though you did the work, you still have no idea what you forced me to do. Unlike you, I've actually been around Wikia for a long time. That means I've got a lot of signatures that actually do need changing. Just look at tardis:Special:Editcount/CzechOut and see the number of talk, forum, and howling edits I've got. Sure, not every one of these uses the signature that I just got rid of 'em. But it's still a very big, multi-thousand number of signatures that need to be changed.

You're telling me that I can just leave them in place, but that's completely unreasonable. I'm not about to have my signature associated with an obivous code error on my own home wiki. I'm supposed to be the tech admin. I wrote the help file on signatures. What kinda confidence will I inspire in that regard if my signature displays errors?

'And yet when I change them, what happens to our Forum threads? You guessed it — they now longer sort according to the last meaningful edit. They sort according to the bot run you've just made me perform.

You may be smart, and I willingly admit thatyour javascript knowledge is greater than mine, but you've really gotta learn when to pick your battles. My sig's presence on Community was such a minor issue. The knock-on effect outside of community is far, far greater than you allowed for or apparently cared about.

What you've done here is use 'unwritten "policy" — and I put it in quotation marks because there's really no such thing as policy that is unwritten — to force me to change my signature throughout Wikia. So, for a few hundred instances on this wiki, you've forced me to make around 10,000 changes elsewhere, where the RTE isn't even enabled.

So you haven't just inconvenienced me. You've totally wasted my time. If you ever have a problem with me again, I urge you to ask me why I'm doing things the way I'm doing them, rather than immediately insisting that I'm in violation of a policy you know doesn't exist.

If you hadn't immediately escalated the thread into a question of TOU violation, I would have offered to manually sign my posts here. Manual signatures are what I do on all the international versions of w:c:doctorwho, so I'm quite used to it. That would have solved your problem without forcing me to do a lot of work elsewhere. But no. You had to go and get a Staff member to order me to change my signature.

If you learn anything from this experience, I urge you to consider this: there is never a good reason to involve staff with users who are behaving politely towards you. Just because someone says "no" when you ask them to do something is not a reason to call the cops. It just means you have to work a little harder to convince them of your position.