User:Smashman/Signature rules

Customizing your signature

A registered user can customize his or her signature, but within reason. Read through and understand all of the following before attempting to customize your signature.

When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing, or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors may find them disruptive to discourse on talk pages. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read while editing talk pages.

General rules and considerations

It is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the user name it represents.

• Do not add offensive or illegal content to your signature.
• Do not attempt to impersonate another user. Avoid having similar signatures to reduce the possibility of mistaken attribution.
• As this wiki is primarily in English, avoid excessive use of non-Latin characters as it may be illegible to most users or unnecessarily difficult to identify. Users with non-Latin user names should consider using a Latin version of their user name.
• Do realize that the issue of user names is a subjective matter. If you see a disruptive signature and would like to ask that user to change it, please remember to be polite. If you are being asked to change your signature, please do not interpret a polite request to be an attack. Remain calm and work on getting to a mutually acceptable resolution.
• Avoid changing your signature often, especially into something entirely different. Your signature is what identifies you as a user, and changing signatures may cause unnecessary confusion and misidentification.

Links

You must at least include a link to either your user page or your talk page. It may optionally also include a link to your contributions. Aside from the above three links, no other internal or external links are allowed. If there are useful pages you wish to bookmark, place them in your user page, not your signature.

Appearance

Your signature should neither inconvenience nor annoy other editors.

• Markup tags or styles that increase your text size, repositions the text, or otherwise changes the flow of the text, as well as line breaks (such as <br />) are not allowed.
• Avoid using hardly readable or uncommon font families and always provide a common alternative font family.
• Although <small> is allowed, do not make your signature so small that it becomes difficult to read.
• Do not use text animations or effects that cause visual disruption of a text page.
• Be sparing with the use of colors, especially background colors. Avoid using bright and glaring colors that disrupts the readability of a text page.

Length

Use short signatures, both in display and markup.

• Signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window unnecessarily clutter the edit window and make it more difficult to distinguish meaningful comments from the signatures.
• The presence of long signatures disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating a response. A 200-character signature, for instance, is already longer than most comments.
• Long signatures that are not broken by spaces cause edit windows to widen horizontally (any user may add spaces to it).

Images

One small image or icon may be included in your signature.

• The image used is constrained to a maximum size of 19x19 pixels to avoid disrupting text spacing and readability.
• Animated images are not allowed due to the visual disruption they can cause.
• Be sparing with the use of colors, especially background colors. Avoid using bright and glaring colors that disrupts the readability of a text page.
• The image used could redirect to either your user page or your talk page.
• Due to the above, the image file you use must be uniquely yours and used by you alone. Upload it under the appropriate name, e.g. "Image:User Example sig.png" as the signature image of User:Example. See Team Fortress Wiki:Images for more details on user images. When uploading, also add {{user image}} to the image's description.

Example of poor signatures

--XxFrAgMaStA420xX···my talk page!!!1 20:17, November 12, 2024 (UTC)