Thread:CzechOut/@comment-4674838-20120825232426/@comment-188432-20120828015155

Hearing no speedy reply from you, Mathmagician, I went ahead and corrected my signature. But of course it has left behind a mess. Why? Because all of the previous signatures had span tags in them. Remember? That's what was triggering the RTE abortion. So what happens to these span tags? Nothing. They're still there. They remain on the page even after you change the templates, because they're substituted. So throughout this wiki — no, throughout every wiki on which I've contributed — everything I've signed up till today will still trigger source mode. You've achieved nothing by forcing me to change my signature. Except that now, what was a cool enough signature, has a big, honkin', visible span tag around it.

So I have to take time out to clean up the mess on my home wiki, and ask other people to do the same. You've forced me to change my signature from something that was working into something that appears to be broken on hundreds of pages in my home wiki where the RTE isn't even enabled.

And you've made me look like some kind of stubborn, bug exploiter in front of the staff.

So thanks for that. This conversation has been one of the biggest time-wasters I've ever had on Wikia.

Oh, and by the way, you've chosen to do this right in the middle of the run up to my home wiki's busiest time of the year. Doctor Who returns on Saturday after a nine month absence. And what am I doing? Cleaning up after something that was only bothering you.

I come here to serve the community and to help out. What thanks do I get? Some dude with a recently-obtained BS who thinks he's a genius completely wasting my time. This entire exercise is pointless. Just to complete the school metaphor, this is the digital equivalent of being made to write lines in detention while all the other kids are gettin' to play outside.

The worst part of this whole thing is that I don't have a bot on every wiki to which I've contributed. I won't be able to clean up this mess everywhere. I doubt seriously whether anyone here at Community is going to fire up a bot and clean up my signatures. So when people go back to read these archived threads, they're gonna find my advice circumspect because they're gonna say, "This guy doesn't even know how to code his sig. Why should we listen to him?" You've made me look like an idiot.

An apology, or at least an admission that your genius level intellect didn't foresee this outcome, wouldn't go amiss.