Forum:Signatures

Hi, just a quick random-ish question. If you use a template for signatures, and make some changes to it, would you want that change to "back-date" and show in all old uses of your signature? Or would you prefer that the change took effect only on any future uses? Thanks for opinions! -- sannse (talk) 10:48, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I thought we declared that signature templates were evil, a pointless burden on the servers, and should die... awhile back?
 * Also, trying to modify the system so that old templates don't update is a rather ugly and hacky thing to do.
 * Actually, what I'd rather like to see instead (something I was thinking of doing awhile back) would be to see a  tag. Something that would attempt to use User:.../signature, protect that from other users editing it, and would not trigger job que updates. That solution would work better than both options of including a template (which adds unnecessary items to the job que) or substing large markup of a signature into the page. Actually, that would be even more interesting if the ~ substitution was hacked to use a custom time format.
 * On a side note, it would be nice if the default signature actually included a talk link. I get poked by to many users with the default signature, and it's annoying when there is no talkpage link to get back to their talkpage. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) (tricks) (current topic) Aug 4, 2008 @ 17:59 (UTC)
 * Tim Starling says that the problem that caused them to block un-subst'ed templates in signatures is now fixed. So he is introducing a setting in MediaWiki to allow them.  But to me, that leaves a couple of things "un-fixed".  One is the problem that sig settings are universal, and sig templates aren't.  The second is the question of whether old sigs should update to a new template.  I'm not sure what people would actually want for this, hence the question :) -- sannse (talk) 08:08, 5 August 2008 (UTC)