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