Last modified: 2004-12-27 01:46:45 UTC
The 1.4 parser reacts to links in signatures by rendering the "fixed" part of the signature ([[User:Name| ]]) in plain text, without an obvious method for preventing it from doing so. The server should omit the fixed portion instead.
If you produce invalid links, obviously they're not going to render nicely. This has always been the case.
The point is, the server is producing invalid links by adding wikicode even when it shouldn't. Users have no control over what it adds. 1.3 at least handled this gracefully by allowing piped links to contain links. Wouldn't it be possible to have a User:Name/Signature subpage with behavior similar to the custom CSS subpages? That would eliminate all current problems with signatures; the server would simply have to write [[User:Name]] to the page at account creation.
If you reopen, please add information which could be used to reproduce the problem, such as an example of text which causes a problem but is not expected to.
Simply placing [[link]] or [http://link] in the signature is enough to trigger the bug. [[User:Name|[[link]] ]] produces [[User:Name|<a href="/wiki/Link">link</a>]] [[User:Name|[http://link] ]] produces [[User:Name|<a href="http://link" class='external'>[1]</a> <span class='urlexpansion'>(<i>http://link</i>)</span> ]] [[User:Name|[http://link link] ]] produces [[User:Name|<a href="http://link" class='external'>link</a> ]] The first and third of these are valid in 1.3; en: produces <a href="/wiki/User:Name"></a><a href="/wiki/Link">link</a> and <a href="/wiki/User:Name"></a><a href='http://link' class='external'>link</a>. For no apparent reason, [[User:Name|[http://link] ]] doesn't work properly in 1.3. The server should at least drop <a href="/wiki/User:Name"></a>; 1.3 and 1.4 both produce this empty link even for [[User:Name| ]].
The above describes correct behavior. 1.3 didn't handle these cases properly, producing invalid HTML.
That's a little disingenuous, isn't it? 1.3 and 1.4 produce valid HTML in all cases; the empty links might be odd, but they don't interfere with anything. 1.3 at least gives what everyone would expect (mostly; [[b|[[a]] b [[c]]]] gives links to "a" and "c" but not "b"). On the other hand, 1.4 dumps unmodified wikicode onto the page, producing invalid, visible text. Besides, you aren't addressing the problem, which is that the invalid wikicode is produced by the server. The server shouldn't add code it will later refuse to process.
The parser is acting correctly in trying to make sense of broken wikitext, and this will not be changed. Changed summary field to describe what seems to be requested.
Now that 1.4 is live, you can see quite clearly what the bug is (for example, at the [[Village Pump]]. It's a bit late for idealist prescriptivism; this problem is simply not going to go away.
Closing as INVALID, since apparently you *don't* want the sig to not create the surrounding link if the nick contains link characters itself and have changed the summary and made comments which appear to reject the idea. If you do want that after all, please please file a separate enhancement request.
Oh come on, these aren't separate problems. Did you even look at the [[Village Pump]]? How do you propose to fix the "invalid" wikicode there and who knows how many other places and variations? There may be like 300,000 pages across the entire project with some form of this bug, depending on how creatively this allegedly invalid syntax has been used. Existing signatures have to be dealt with in some way, and to prevent similar problems in the future, the server should do sth more intelligent than pasting wikicode where it doesn't belong.
You're the one who insists on not using this bug report to hold the fix for new signatures. I'm not sure why you insist on this, but since you do I ask that you file a separate bug report (which will remain open until I mark it as FIXED after checkin the code to do it later tonight). Existing invalid code remains invalid because it's _already invalid_. We're not going to _put bugs back_, I'm sorry if that bothers you.
Just to ask, everyone noticed the new feature for sigs?
