Help:Sign your posts on talk pages

Your username is displayed in the edit histories of all the articles you contribute to and is linked to your user and talk pages. You choose your name when you first register on wiki.gis.com and it is usual to stay with the same name throughout your time on the project.

You should always sign your posts on talk pages. Signatures are the text that appears before the timestamp when you put content on a page. Signatures are customized using "my preferences" under "User profile".

You can use any wikitext as your signature (simply check the "Sign my name exactly as shown" box). If "Sign my name exactly as shown" is unchecked, the software treats this as your nickname and makes your signature " Nickname (talk) " which is rendered as:

Nickname (talk)

When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing, or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. For example, some editors find that long formatting disrupts discourse on talk pages, or makes working in the edit window more difficult. Complicated signatures contain a lot of code that is revealed in the edit window, and can take up unnecessary amounts of narrative space, which can make both reading and editing harder.

Never use another editor's signature. Impersonating another editor by using his or her username or signature is forbidden. Altering the markup code of your signature to make it look substantially like another user's signature may also be considered a form of impersonation. Editing the code of your signature to link it to another editor's userpage is not permitted. While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the user name it represents.

If you encounter a user whose signature is disruptive or appears to be impersonating another account, it is appropriate to ask that user to consider changing their signature to meet the requirements of this guideline. When making such a request, always be polite, and assume good faith. Do not immediately assume that the user has intentionally selected a disruptive or inappropriate signature. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. Since the success of wiki.gis.com is based on effective teamwork, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.

Your signature should not blink, scroll, or otherwise inconvenience or annoy other editors.


 * Avoid markup such as  tags and   markup (which produce big text), or line breaks (  tags), since they disrupt the way that surrounding text displays. The limited use of non-breaking spaces to ensure that the signature displays on one line is allowed.
 * Be sparing with superscript or subscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed.
 * Do not make your signature so small that it is difficult to read.
 * As some users have vision problems, be sparing with color. If you must use different colors in your signature please ensure that the result will be readable by people with color blindness, defective color vision, and other visual disabilities.We recommend a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 for text – use this Contrast ratio calculator to help determine if the colors you choose will be visible to everyone.  wiki.gis.com's background colour (on the default monobook skin) is light blue (#F8FCFF).
 * Do not include horizontal rules.

Images of any kind must not be used in signatures for the following reasons:
 * they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown
 * a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks
 * they make pages more difficult to read and scan
 * they make it more difficult to copy text from a page
 * they are potentially distracting from the actual message
 * images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without
 * they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page
 * images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution

Keep signatures short, both in display and markup.

Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing and discussion more difficult for the following reasons:
 * signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures,
 * long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution,
 * signatures which have long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces cause other editors' edit boxes to show unnecessary horizontal scrollbars (such signatures may have spaces added to them by any editor),
 * signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing the editor to scroll when writing their reply, and
 * the presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating their reply

The software will automatically truncate both plain and raw signatures to 255 characters (characters used for HTML/wiki markup are included!).