Last modified: 2012-08-02 13:08:30 UTC
Apparently there's currently no option to limit signature length. Could we please add a hard cap that can be enabled to keep people from using five-line monstrosities?
...and 16-line (1300+ character) monstrosities as seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Sign_your_posts_on_talk_pages#Nice_Signatures I'd like to see a 200 character limit (or even better, a 150 character limit). The most colorful sig I can think of (that noone (except me) has complained about) is 175 characters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:The_Transhumanist#10_chars_shorter).
A (slightly controversial) alternative suggested in this thread (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Reduce_the_size_limit_for_sigs.3F) is to remove the custom signature ability altogether, but replace with the option to add a 'talk' link after the username in the sig. E.g. [[User:Username]] · [[User talk:Userame|talk]]
I'd go for 250 chars which would prevent most monstrus situations, while maintaining the 'grey' ones for case-by-case evaluation.
Remember that it probably needs to be at least as long as the longest possible default signature. That's about six characters plus twice the max username length plus twice the length of the user namespace, I believe. Of course, de facto max username lengths might be shorter than whatever the maximum technical limit we have is on some projects.
If someone has a 50 character username, they darn well better be piping it to something shorter... (Hence even with a talkpage link, it'll end up <200 chars.)
Also see [[Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Signature_length]], where we suggested using templates for signatures (oh noes!1), while simultaneously limiting the server damage they can cause. If the only template allowed in signatures was {{User:Username/sig}}, the /sig page could be made into a special page, like User:Username/monobook.css. At the very least, it could provide a message on editing (like the "Tip: Use the 'Show preview' button..." message on monobook.css) encouraging short sigs and saying to not change them all the time. Better yet, it could be made so that you can only edit that page once a month or something like that, or the sig templates could get an extremely low priority in the servers, so that changes to them only propagate during times of low server load. So if someone changes their sig template every day, the changes will slowly trickle out through the site only after a week or so. This would solve the server load problem, the talk page code clutter problem, and the "i need an oh so cool signature that changes every day to keep up with my frequent username changes" problem at the same time.
(In reply to comment #6) > Better yet, it could be made so that you can only edit that page once a month or > something like that, or the sig templates could get an extremely low priority in > the servers, so that changes to them only propagate during times of low server > load. So if someone changes their sig template every day, the changes will > slowly trickle out through the site only after a week or so. This would require adding a lot of special-case stuff for signatures, which is not a path we want to travel at all. Complicated signatures are not important for the primary goal of Wikipedia, and we certainly aren't about to change MediaWiki to give them special treatment. A length limit seems adequate to my mind.
(In reply to comment #7) > This would require adding a lot of special-case stuff for signatures, which is > not a path we want to travel at all. Complicated signatures are not important > for the primary goal of Wikipedia, and we certainly aren't about to change > MediaWiki to give them special treatment. It wouldn't *just* be for long stupid signatures. It would be for any low-priority templates; when it would be nice to use a template, but the template would hurt the servers if changes to it propagated immediately. (That *is* the main reason why templates are bad for the servers, right? Because a change to a widely-used template invalidates the caches of every page it is used on?) But there are many templates like this where it's not important that the changes propagate instantly, and the caches could be invalidated only during periods of low load. > A length limit seems adequate to my mind. :-\ Even length-limited sigs are hard to read around compared to {{User:Username/sig}} (even with syntax highlighting). The people discussing length limits on the Village Pump are suggesting things like "200 characters" or "5 lines". Ick. For the record, I'm not trying to claim that long stupid signatures are helpful. I don't use them and I don't like them. But other people like them and are going to use them, right up to the edge of the limits that are imposed on them. I want to make this situation easier for others, such as myself, to deal with.
*** Bug 10177 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See gallery at [[User:Athaenara/Gallery]]
I think 255 characters is a reasonable limit. Anyone with a username long enough to make that a problem (it would have to be over 100 characters, for them not to be able to make the default [[User:Foo|Foo]] link to it) is likely to be blocked anyway.
Added $wgMaxSigChars in r22960, defaulting to 255.
This is partially broken. See bug 38974.
(In reply to comment #13) > This is partially broken. See bug 38974. Bug 10715 it is.
