On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Keegan Peterzell <kpeterzell(a)wikimedia.org wrote: 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? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l