On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Keegan Peterzell kpeterzell@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?