Tech news sections have no "subscribe" and "reply" links (when the relevant DiscussionTools sections are enabled). While I doubt they would be used much, the inconsistency is confusing. (See huwiki discussion.)
Example: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Kocsmafal_(m%C5%B1szaki)#Tech_News:_2022-36
I guess this is because of the lack of signature? Would be nice if it was fixed in the Tech News template.
(The User-notice tag is just to get Tech News maintainers' attention, not because I want to add this to the news.)
Yeah, everything in DiscussionTools hangs off of the signature. There's no way to flag unsigned content as a comment that gets access to all the reply/subscribe tools.
@DLynch What's the exact definition of a signature here? For a couple of reasons, this wouldn't be a good solution, but still curious if a semi-manual signature would work. E.g.:
[[User:Johan (WMF)|Johan (WMF)]] ~~~~~
(Since the user actually posting is "MediaWiki message delivery".)
@Johan a signature is a link to a user-related page (user page, user talk page, user contributions page) that closely precedes a timestamp (in the format that the current wiki is using). Manually creating a signature as you suggest should work, though you might want to double-check whatever you use on a sandbox talk page somewhere before sending it out.
(Our guideline when writing the parser for this was to be very permissive -- if you write something that matches the signature rules, we should catch it.)
Ah, if just a userpage link will work, then I guess we could sign as [[User:MediaWiki message delivery|MediaWiki message delivery]].
I'd previously wanted to avoid a full-signature, because that would leave redlinks to the usertalk page in most projects.
I'll try that this week. (docs now updated: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech/News/Manual&diff=23808824&oldid=23663964&diffmode=source)
Ah, the problem I'd noticed when trying this many month's ago was the LTR username + RTL timestamp. E.g. test 1
But I think I've solved it by just wrapping the username in a <span class="mw-content-ltr" lang="en" dir="ltr">your content</span>... E.g. test 2
It still has the Discussiontool links, and doesn't appear to cause any problems (beyond making the sig's wikitext a bit more complex). Hopefully this works! (docs updated)
if just a userpage link will work, then I guess we could sign as
@Quiddity the timestamp is required as well — you’d need to at least put a ~~~~~ on the end of that.
Yup. We were previously just using a 5-~~~~~ timestamp.
I've now sent this week's, and it seems good.
E.g.1. https://als.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ATechnik#Technische_Neuigkeiten:_2022-38
E.g.2. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7:%D8%B3%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9tech_news#%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%82%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9:_2022-38
Unless anyone notices problems, I think we can declare this solved?