Forum:Signatures and their templates

I'll start off by saying that this idea is from KATANAGOD, I'll steal the making of this thread from him. (I'm so evil.)

(Just in case you don't know: SUBST (in this context) means that when a template is left, it will convert to its raw code when the page is saved. For example, if I were to leave without SUBST (no-SUBST), it would appear as such when editing later, while if I left , when I save it, the template will convert to its original code (the one that's on the template's page) and appear as if I left that text when someone else edits it later. You probably should catch my drift.)

So, the main point here is should a signature (unless the signature is the default one) always be templated and no-SUBST'd to prevent chaos in Source Mode editing. If you don't know: a signature that's left with simply ~ (when you have SUBST'd template or the raw code in your signature box in Special:Preferences), it will create likely even hundreds of bytes of text in Source Mode, depending on the signature model. Templated and no-SUBST'd sigs create only a small amount of code, as seen on this example (the upper is the SUBST'd one and lower non-SUBST'd). Note that my sig is quite simple: a different one could take much more space.

What's the solution? It's quite simple for people with a sig to:
 * 1) Create it into a template, with name like "Template:Signatures/ExampleUser" (if this is already done, proceed to step 2)
 * 2) There are two solutions:
 * 3) On this wiki, we have Nosubst. With this, people can type " " in the sig box in their preferences, then simply sign posts with four tildes.
 * 4) Simply type " " (note: five tildes) when signing posts, or create a custom edit button on your own wikia.js that when pressed will automatically make the above appear.

I think this should be put in COD:SIG, because it does take a big number of bytes. And after all, it's only one signature. If you want to make another signature without the previous changing, you can create a new one with the name "Template:Signatures/ExampleUser 2" and use that in future.

I hope that what I said is readable and clear, I'm a little tired, so I pretty much just wrote in the order what appeared on my mind. 21:18, November 29, 2011 (UTC)