Last modified: 2014-09-24 00:04:51 UTC
It's not always entirely clear to newer editors whether or not an edit should be signed. I suggest dropping the signature button from the toolbar. On talk pages and pages that were tagged to be automatically signed, a "Sign this post" checkbox would be added to the editing form, initially checked, and unless it was cleared, MediaWiki would automatically add a signature at the end of the post (replacing SineBot on Wikipedia), as long as the edit added a new paragraph. On pages that were not automatically signed, the only way to sign an edit would be to type in tildes.
Looks like something to do per-project, according to its guidelines. Perhaps even as an extension (although everything would be javascript), but not so appropiate for core.
The usual issues with automatically signing edits: how does the software know reliably when a post should be signed, and when it shouldn't?
Interesting thought, although it would be difficult to figure out where the signature goes in all but the most trivial cases. Might be irrelevant (for enwiki, at least) once LiquidThreads goes live.
@Happy-melon Our best shot would probably be to persuade Slakr on en.wp to release the relevant parts of the SineBot code (which is in PHP and therefore shouldn't be too difficult to integrate).
(In reply to comment #4) > @Happy-melon Our best shot would probably be to persuade Slakr on en.wp to > release the relevant parts of the SineBot code (which is in PHP and therefore > shouldn't be too difficult to integrate). I doubt that code is awfully sophisticated. There are some corner cases where it's difficult to figure out. If you're a bot, it's okay to just ignore it. If you're a piece of software which the user has explicitly asked to sign their posts for them, then you really need to either figure out where to sign, or you need to error out to give the user some feedback. It's okay for a bot to fail silently, but it isn't okay for the interface to fail silently.
(In reply to comment #5) > It's okay for a bot to fail silently, but it isn't okay for the > interface to fail silently. > Absolutely. There are innumerable cases where determining what should and should not be signed is nontrivial (ie hideously complicated and messy), and yet by making it a software feature, we present an impression that the feature is actually reliable, which it can't be. LiquidThreads is definitely the way to proceed.
I've made such JS extension, it can be installed as JS gadget (but the description is currently only German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Perhelion/signing
