User:ToBeFree/HTML signatures
 | This is an essay on a personal pet peeve. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
If I had one wish for a permanent Wikimedia server configuration change, it would be adding the following line to CommonSettings.php:
$wgHiddenPrefs[] = 'fancysig'; # disallow treating the "Signature" preference as wiki markup
It would probably take a few years for the protests to cease and the community to get used to it, but would in the end make our freely licensed discussion pages more accessible with cleaner, standardized code. Reading discussion source code is already a challenge especially for new non-technical users; adding completely unnecessary HTML tags to it is not helpful. If you want to be noticed on discussion pages, attract readers with good arguments instead of fancy colors.