Sign your posts on talk pages

Signing your posts on wiki talk pages is a guideline for the use of user signatures on Wikia wikis. To sign your name on a talk page comment, type four tildes ( ~ ) after your comment and click the "save" button.

Signing your posts on talk pages and other wiki discussions (but not on articles) is not only good etiquette; it also facilitates discussion by helping other users to identify the author of a particular comment, to navigate talk pages, and to address specific comments to the relevant user(s), among other things. Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing as it helps other users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.

Purpose of signatures
Signatures on Wikia identify you as a user, and your contributions to Wikia. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment, and the date and time at which it was made.

When signatures should be used
Any post made to user talk pages, article talk pages, or other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures on Wikia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any Wikipedia article. In other instances when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.

How to "sign" your posts
There are two ways to sign your posts:

1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes (~), like this:  ~.

2. If you are using the edit toolbar option (which must be enabled under Special:Preferences), click the signature icon  to add the four tildes.

Your signature will appear after you have saved the changes.

The end result is the same in both cases. Typing four tildes will result in the following:

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Typing three tildes results in the following:

Since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

Note that if you choose to contribute to Wikipedia without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username.

Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity. In actual fact, a pseudonymous account (that is, a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity.

Note also that signing manually with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon does not give you more anonymity or privacy protection, since your IP address will still be stored in the page history. This also makes it more difficult for other users to communicate with you. If you choose to sign this way, you should still type four tildes: --anon ~.

Customizing your signature
Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Signature".

While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the username it represents. Signatures that obscure an account name to the casual reader may be seen as disruptive.

Important considerations

 * When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind:

A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors find it disruptive to discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read talk pages while editing.

If asking another user to change their signature, remember to remain polite. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. As Wikia is based on working together in harmony, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.

Length
Keep signatures short, both in display and markup.

Long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing more difficult. A 200 character signature, for instance, is likely to be larger than many of the comments to which it is appended, making discussion more difficult:


 * signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures,
 * long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution,
 * signatures which have excessively long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces can cause a later editor's edit box to show an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar

Dealing with unsigned comments
The template can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or IP to the comment. None of these templates automatically populate (fill in) the name or IP of the poster and the time of the post. That information is best copied from the history page and pasted into the below templates.

It is also a good idea to notify users, especially new users, that they should sign their comments. You may use the template on the user's talk page.