Thread:Mathmagician/@comment-188432-20120827220853/@comment-188432-20120828144706

Maybe it'd be helpful for clarification to give you the Special:Preferences code rather than pointing you towards the substitution that you see on pages. The old code looks like:

((subst:#time: whatever}}

As you can see, this would "stamp"  and   onto every signature. /autosig would bring up /Sig, /Time would bring up /TimeFormat, and you'd have your signature.

The solution to the RTE "problem" is to put the span tags back into the second template. But if you do that, then the  that's already on the page will now display because it immediately encounters another   within the second tempalte. It's redundant, and reundant HTML tags display.

Does that make the issue any clearer? I really do want you — or just somebody here — to understand that there is a genuine problem here that can only be resolved by removing  on every page on which it occurs.