The sig is meant to be a link to the user page; the nick is plaintext. It's a cute thing that you can make funky links with it by
breaking the rule, but it's just a cute plaything, not an intended or desired feature.

river wrote:

Including a link to the talk page is useful enough that it should be possible
without hackery.

(In reply to comment #2)

Including a link to the talk page is useful enough that it should be possible
without hackery.

If that's so, then this request, which is for such hackery, should be denied.

river wrote:

How is it a request for hackery?

river wrote:

Changed summary to the actual feature that's being requested, and which is
widely used. It would be even nicer if we could entirely disallow wikitext in
signatures and just use a username or nickname and optional talk page.

BTW, you can omit the [[ and ]] in your signature as a temporary workaround. I
use "<nowiki></nowiki>]]&mdash; [[User:Kate|Kate Turner]] | [[User
talk:Kate|Talk" which produces correct wikitext and renders correctly.

MacGyverMagic wrote:

Note that the implementation of this feature in MediaWiki 1.4 also messed up old signatures by
adding coding to them.

Option for 'raw' signatures added: you can put whatever you want in the nick field
and have that inserted without the surrounding automatic user page link. Resolving
as fixed.

Regarding comment #6: 'correct' hackery was *not* affected by parser fixes in
MediaWiki 1.4 -- but a few people had incorrectly set their nick fields in a way
which produced invalid code which happened to look right previously due to parser
bugs in 1.3. Correct hackery would have been a nick that looked something like
"name]] [[User_talk:Name|talk", producing as final output "[[User:Name|name]]
[[User_talk:Name|talk]]"

The sig is inserted at edit time, so the parser can't "undo" your old, invalid sigs.

MacGyverMagic wrote:

(In reply to comment #7)

Option for 'raw' signatures added: you can put whatever you want in the nick field
and have that inserted without the surrounding automatic user page link. Resolving
as fixed.
Regarding comment #6: 'correct' hackery was *not* affected by parser fixes in
MediaWiki 1.4 -- but a few people had incorrectly set their nick fields in a way
which produced invalid code which happened to look right previously due to parser
bugs in 1.3. Correct hackery would have been a nick that looked something like
"name]] [[User_talk:Name|talk", producing as final output "[[User:Name|name]]
[[User_talk:Name|talk]]"

Please check my edits from yesterday or before at the Wikipedia Help desk and Votes for
deletion for proof of old signatures changing.

The sig is inserted at edit time, so the parser can't "undo" your old, invalid sigs.

MacGyverMagic wrote:

See English Wikipedia Help desk for old bugs (even from November 11) changing with new signature
implementation.

This is explained above. Your old nick generated invalid code, which due to a bug
turned out in a fashion that you found acceptable. With the parser bugs fixed, you can
now see that your code was, indeed not correct.

You can now check an option in your preferences to produce the _correct_ output for
that type of signature.

qleah wrote:

(In reply to comment #10)

This is explained above. Your old nick generated invalid code, which due to a bug
turned out in a fashion that you found acceptable. With the parser bugs fixed,

you can

now see that your code was, indeed not correct.

As I have noted on bug 1142, the invalid code is present in uncountably many
talk pages and their archives. It is entirely unhelpful to declare the old
behavior buggy; do you expect somebody to hunt down all occurrences of the bug
and fix the old signatures?

You can now check an option in your preferences to produce the _correct_

output for

that type of signature.

Thank you.