Uncyclopedia:Sign your posts or DIE!

This page is considered a policy on Uncyclopedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone should follow, unless they don't want to, in which case they are free to ignore it so long as they're not being a dick. Please make use of the standing on one knee position to propose to this policy.

“SIGN YOUR FUCKING NAME WITH 4 TILDES, YOU STUPID CUNT.”

~ Encyclopedia Dramatica on Signing your posts

Signing your posts on talk pages and other Uncyclopedia discourse (but NOT on articles) is not only required by UNSOC, but also keeps the admins sane by helping them to identify the author of a particular piece of worthless crap comment, to navigate complain talk pages, and to ban idiots who spam for 27 years address specific comments to the relevant user(s), among other things. Discussion is an important part of Communism collaborative editing as it helps other users to flame you understand the progress and evolution of a work.

Sign your fucking posts, or face the wrath of the giant tilde!

Why Signatures Exist

Three and a half million years ago, the first animal crawled out of the primordial seas and wrote "I WUZ HERE" just to prove he did it. Unfortunately, we don't know who it was, since they forgot to sign their message. So if you want to get the blame credit for your comments, sign your posts by using the following:

~~~~

How to sign your posts

There are two ways to sign your posts:

1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes wavy lines (~), like this: ~~~~.

2. If you are using the edit toolbar option (it appears above the edit screen as a default), click the signature icon () to add the four tildes.

Your pretty-flashing-color-seziure-zone will appear after you have saved the changes.

Either way, the same general thing happens. Typing four tildes wavy lines will result in the following:

What you type	What the page says	What Sophia changes it to
~~~~	[[User:Example|Example]] 16:52, 21 November 2024 (UTC)	Example 16:52, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Since typing four tildes wavy lines adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Typing three tildes wavy lines results in the following:

The royal crest of AAAAAAA	The answer to the royal crest (which is NOT 42, that's the answer to EVERYTHING, which is completely different)	Column C
~~~	[[User:Example|Example]]	Example

Since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Typing five tildes wavy lines will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

ZOMG	WTF	BBQPWN
~~~~~	16:52, 21 November 2024 (UTC)	16:52, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Note that if you choose to submit even more worthless crap to Uncyclopedia than is already there without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username.

Your IP address might look something like this: 689.6.9.69. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity. Actually, a pseudonymous account (i.e. a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity because any moron who knows Google's address can easily find out where you live and launch a catapult that shoots catapults that shoots catapults at you. Registered users have their IP addresses hidden from public view.

Note also that signing manually with a piece of crap such as --anon does NOT give you more protection from Grues, since your IP address will still be stored in the page history. This also makes it more difficult for other users to communicate with you. If you choose to be a member of the unwashed IP masses, you should still type four tildes, like this: --689.6.9.69

SO USE THIS!

~~~~

Pimp your Sig

Whoops! Maybe you were looking for UN:SIG?

These guys signed. So can you.

Outer Party members (more commonly known under the pseudonym "registered users") can pimp their signature by going to Special:Preferences and screwing with the "Signature" bar.

When pimping your sig, please keep the following in mind: Anything with flashing pretty colors will be nuked. Some people are, sadly, photosensitive and as such you have to keep your sigs small and not-flashing, or we will get sued.

NEVER pretend to be someone else unless that someone is you, and if that is the case the sockpuppet in question will be killed: NEVER use someone else's name, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD do NOT link to someone else's user page. No, not even if you are impersonating Elvis. And, of course, as everyone with a double-digit IQ knows, your sig has to look like your name.

If asking another user to change their signature, remember to remain rude. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid being a pacifist. As Uncyclopedia is based on working together in total discord, both parties should fight it out like men. Yes, even if the two people in question are chicks.

On occasion some n00bs have requested clarification of siggies, and some sig debates turned into all-out war. In one case, a user who refused to change a complete piece of diarrhea was ultimately forced to obey by the Ministry of Love.

Flashing lights and pretty pictures

Unless it is really, REALLY funny, do not use any flashing disco lights. Otherwise we will sic Domo-Kun on you.

• Markup such as <big> tags (which produce big text), or line breaks (<br /> tags) are to be avoided, since they disrupt the way that surrounding text displays. The unlimited use of non-breaking spaces to ensure that the signature displays on one line is allowed.
• Be excessive with superscript or subscript. Most of the time, this type of script will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So have a fucking field day.
• Tiny signatures, while funny, need some big parts.
• Because of users with serious problems (and expensive lawyers), be sparing with colors, pictures, random words, scripts, hyperlinks, references to Nobody Cares, and Your Mom jokes. If you must use them things in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with OOH LOOK AT THAT BIRDIE!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Images

Unlike our lame relatives at Wikipedia, images are highly encouraged for the following reasons:

• They look pretty
• They are funny
• They make sense
• They are watched all the time from admins and therefore cannot be changed to total crap
• They NEVER distract from the posts, unless they do, in which case you pay too much attention to peoples' names.
• In all good browsers images scale with the text, making lines with images exactly in line with the other lines. Not like Wikipedia, they all suck.
• They clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page (which, on this site, is a GOOD thing)
• Images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution (which is an even better thing)

As an alternative to using images, consider using unicode symbols, such as these: ☺☻♥♪♫♣♠♂♀§☭. For a full listing of Unicode characters use the most evil device ever constructed, which you are required by law to use now.

Length

Keep signatures short, both in display and markup. Or you will be shot.

Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup get the admins pissed for the following reasons:

• Signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it hard for admins to tell where the post ends and the sig begins and the post ends and the sig begins and...
• Long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution (which in this case is bad)
• Signatures which have long HTML/wiki markup AND contain no spaces cause other editors' edit boxes to show unnecessary horizontal scrollbars (I pity the foo that does this). However, in some circumstances, long markup is okay. See Template Sigs
• Signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing the editor to scroll down waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much when writing his reply
• The presence of such long signatures in the discussion also keeps people with double-digit IQs and higher from actually contributing

Our robots will nuke any signatures with more than 255 characters.

Internal links

It is required by Uncyclopedia law to include a link to your user page and talk page; the default signature links to the user page, and is allowed, albeit only because we haven't figured out how to change it to include a link to the talk page yet. At least one of those two pages MUST be linked from your signature, to allow other editors to easily whine and complain.

If, while making modifications, you inadvertently disable this link, you're screwed. When you insert your signature on your talk or user page the talk or user link will appear black, bold and inactive as it is a self-reference, so test your signature elsewhere.

It is better to put information on your user page, rather than in your signature. However, including brief additional internal links is generally tolerated if it's part of the official Awards, Decorations, and Honours system.

Do not place any disruptive internal links, such as SIGN HERE!!!, which refers to an autograph page. Unless Spike acknowledges your coolness.

External links

We are cooler than Wikipedia again in THIS part, because we allow external links.

As long as you only use one or two external links, you will be safe. You see, sometimes people need the ability to go to another website while not having to go through all the crap of visiting random user pages. Also, external links are the only effective way of having pictures in your signatures that actually link to something. In summation, as long as your link does not violate the BIOS it is OK. Update: If you put external links in your signature that do not lead to a Wikia site, we will chop, blend, bake, boil, saute, grill, roast, and ban you, in that order.

Template Sigs

We are INFINITELY cooler than Wikipedia here, because signature templates are highly encouraged. There are several reasons for this.

• Signature templates are infinitely better than the default sig and typing a sig into the custom sig bar, and will be forever, even if you become promoted to Queen's Reader. Simple text signatures suck. They just suck. Never use them unless you have no choice.
• Certain automated scripts (bots) are used to automatically archive particularly active talk pages. These bots read the source of the talk page, but don't transclude templates, and so don't recognize the template as a signature. PSYCHE! Our bots are much better than Wikipedia bots, in that they can move templates.
• Signature templates are a small and therefore irrelevant drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing--whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached. Fortunately, we're hosted by Wikia, which doesn't care about that.

Categories

Signatures with categories will be fed to the Vic Viper. Categorizing talk pages by who has edited them is ghey, and the same information can be found by using your contributions list. Many of the various edit counters that don't exist also provide this data.

Non-Latin Usernames

Oh dear GOD, we are SOO COOL and Wikipedia is LAAAME!!! We ENCOURAGE funky usernames in yer sigs!!! Users with non-Latin usernames are welcome to edit in Uncyclopedia. However, non-Latin scripts (such as Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Esperantic, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Indic scripts, Japanese, Korean, Russkie, Thai and others) are illegible to most other contributors of the English Uncyclopedia. Luckily, nobody cares.

Dealing with unsigned comments

Sometimes, there are such retards and assholes as those who posted numerous times on UnNews talk:Communists officially own Eastern hemisphere who absolutely refuse to sign their posts. For them, we have Template:Unsigned. Nonetheless, if more than three unsigned posts are on a page, the rest will be automatically eaten by Grues.

Oh	dear	GOD
{{subst:unsigned|user name or IP}}	{{subst:unsigned|Example}}	—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Example (talk • contribs)
{{subst:unsigned|user name or IP|date}}	{{subst:unsigned|Example|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}}	—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)

It is also a good idea to notify users, especially n00bs, that they should sign their comments. You may use Template:Tilde on the n00b's talk page or contact the Welcoming Committee and have them place a "Welcome to Uncyclopedia!" box on their page.

More about talk pages

See Uncyclopedia:Talk pages for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.

This page was originally sporked from Wikipedia:Signatures.