Yeah, I would say that a bot is a bad idea. Redirects
are cheap and should
be used
On Feb 6, 2015 4:34 PM, "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Keegan Peterzell
<
kpeterzell(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
I'm not a developer my self, so thoughts on
feasibility and
implementation
> are welcome. I think such a tool would be highly useful and I'm
slightly
surprised
it hasn't been made yet.
It wouldn't be hard to have a bot go through and fix signatures, the
problem in the past has been getting community acceptance.
In the past on enwiki many have considered such edits to be useless edits
that clutter watchlists and recentchanges, when someone is going around
making edits to thousands of old discussion pages for what seems to them
to
be very little benefit.
And then there's the issue where if "Joe Wiki" renames himself to
"CoolDude1234" and all signatures are changed, it gets much harder to
follow things if people are calling this person "Joe" or "JW" in
their
comments. Even with the new style of using linked full usernames to
trigger
Echo notifications, would these get replaced
since they're not
signatures?
On the surface, I'd agree. The problem is that many of the people whose
usernames get changed will have them changed because someone else is
usurping the original username, so it's not acceptable to redirect the
(original) userpage to the "new" name; it will now belong to someone
else.This will become increasingly complex as users elect to use the global
userpage that's now being tested per a separate email to this list today.
Those old signatures will link to the wrong user, so there is now a much
more valid reason to update them.
I do agree with both Brad and John that it's not really been considered all
that acceptable in the past on enwiki, but then again in almost all cases
I'm aware of, the user was changing hundreds or even thousands of signature
lines, as a result of an entirely voluntary change in username. I suspect
that, with careful communication, even the enwiki community would come to
see this as a net benefit for username changes related to the SUL
finalization specifically.
What would be needed is some script or bot that changes the signatures from
prior to the date of username change, in particular, so that signatures by
the "new owner" of the username won't be changed.
Risker/Anne