I habitually sign my messages (comments, forum posts, discussion pages, or replies to same) on ikiwiki.info, but not everybody does; especially newcomers might not realise it can be helpful. I think it should be generally encouraged that we do, and think it would be useful for others to add signatures to unsigned comments/forum posts/discussion pages/replies in those situations, perhaps at the point of replying to them.
But what should a standardised signature look like? I propose the format I am using, namely
*— (user-name), YYYY-MM-DD*
Where "user-name" should be the logged-in user or git commit author.name field, if either are defined; that "user-name" should be a wiki-link to the relevant User page if such is known to exist; and failing that, use the string "unsigned comment"; and "YYYY-MM-DD" is substituted with the year-month-day at the time of the comment. I don't see the need for a higher resolution timestamp (always available in the git metadata anyway).
The signature should be suffixed to the last line of the relevant comment-block (as in this example).
If there is general support for this idea, we could develop it further and have machine-assisted signatures, a bit like e.g.
Mediawiki with ~~~~.
There are probably other similar conventions we should canonicalize, such as how to handle replying inline to someone else's comment/forum post/discussion pages/reply and what to do with respect to attribution/signature lines in those situations.
Thoughts? — Jon, 2021-09-29
We get a date for free if the "thing" is a comment, at least.
If one wiki-links to a user-page, then comments/pages/etc show up in the backlinks list at the bottom (under "Links:"). (which reminds me, I hope my patch for backlinks onhover thing can go weird is eventually considered)
I like it. (But it really might not be easy to type manually and keep the precise format. I use dead keys, and also have kbd shortcut that types current ISO date timestamp, so no big deal for me.)
What about optional trailing time format? And should it be in UTC? And explicitly? Like
Having a syntax short-cut like ~~~~ would remove the need.
Personally I think that's too much clutter. But if we were to have it, I'd suggest the data encoded in UTC, but possibly presented in the browser's local timezone. I'm not sure if that's easily achievable.