Some folks in #wikimedia-parsoid are still real excited about the idea though, so a couple more notes should people decide they like it anyway. :) * Consider either a wikitext wrapper like {{#sig:Username}} (my preference) or a markup tag like <sig>Username</sig> (Gabriel's preference I think?) to go in the wikitext; this will make the resulting sigs look less crufty in talk and vote pages (which do still exist, alas!) * Use a span as the actual HTML rendering that can be parsoid-friendly and thus VisualEditor-friendly. * Consider though whether the HTML should be "spoofable" and what happens if you do. * Consider that old revisions and archived talk pages will not have this markup, so there could be inconsistency. Beware what you use it for etc. -- brion On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Brion Vibber &lt;bvibber(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Jackmcbarn &lt;jackmcbarn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The point of this exercise seems to be to be able to identify signatures programmatically in some manner that is supposed to be official "this is a signature, not just a blob of wikitext". But along with the officiality comes the need to consider what happens if someone puts an "official" signature (maybe for someone else) in the middle of their post. OTOH, if you somehow strip the "official" signature markers then what happens when it's an archive bot copying posts to an archive? Or someone moving a misplaced talk page post to the correct location? -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

The idea of <sig> seems fine to me as a way to semantically designate signatures, however I'd like to caution against using a <span> in the expanded text, as while it may not be an issue with WMF wikis, some third-party wikis format signatures like you would in a forum (in that there is a signature "block" underneath the post, alas I cannot find that wiki again so no example), and these signatures can contain block-level elements. Rendering to a <span> may break that style of discussion, perhaps we can instead render to a <div> and set display: inline for it in the default css. Then a wiki could override this to move it wherever or display it as a block if they so choose. Another alternative is keep the span, but add a hook to allow extensions to fully modify the output (including changing the span to something else), that way we can keep the sig semantically valid for the 99.99% of them that are actually used inline. Also, +1 from me on *not* automatically changing old sigs as they get updated, as we could lose valuable temporal information that way (such as the aforementioned "I'm being paid to edit" disclosure). Wrapping existing signatures in <sig> seems fine if someone wants to code that system, but that's the extent I would personally go with modifying existing signatures. Regards, Ryan Schmidt On Oct 1, 2014, at 7:42 AM, Derric Atzrott &lt;datzrott(a)alizeepathology.com&gt; wrote:

2014-10-01 17:17 GMT+02:00 Ryan Schmidt &lt;skizzerz(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Using a <div> inside list markup (and we inexplicably use list markup for discussions) will probably cause HTML Tidy to throw up all over the output, a <span> is probably the only option. As you can see by the list of blockers to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2542 , Tidy will horribly break most of interesting kinds of markup. (Not that I think trying to mark up sigs is a very good idea in general, for the reasons Brion mentioned.)

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Subramanya Sastry &lt;ssastry(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: This was written[1] for Echo a couple years ago at the beginning of the project. This particular implementation is far from perfect, but here are a couple of the complexities involved: * a single regexp doesn't currently match timestamps in different languages, so a timestamp regex is generated based on the $wgContLang timestamp output. * wiki's each control their own signature[2]. Changing the signature exposed a bug[3] in Echo which caused it to stop sending mention notifications. * The fix[4] for above basically switches the code around to extract wikilinks from the wikitext and run their content through Title to determine if a link is to NS_USER, NS_USER_TALK, or the Contributions page of NS_SPECIAL, all of which appear in signatures. could be cleaned up and work well enough. Erik B. [1] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Echo/blob/master/includes… [2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Signature [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71353 [4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/163651/ (b) new markup <span>/<sig>/{{#sig:..}} added via PST -se- cleaner, but

On 9/30/14, Brion Vibber &lt;bvibber(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Would this mean that if people had a fancy sig, and they changed it, it would automatically update everywhere with this magic tag instead of just applying to new signatures? (Which might be cool) Downside to that you might have some tricky issue where people change their sig after the fact to be something malicious (For some definition of malicious), and then all the old sigs change without an edit to track it and generally be a vehicle for mass vandalism. (Didn't that use to be an issue on /. ?) --bawolff

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Brian Wolff &lt;bawolff(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Other downside of this would be the performance hit of looking up all those signatures. Some pages have hundreds, if not thousands, of different users' signatures. Jackmcbarn