Signatures identify you as the author of a block of text on a talk page. They should contain an automatic link to your user page, making it easy for others to learn more about you and communicate with you. The date contained in the signature also indicates how current the discussion is and the order in which comments were made.
On talk pages, signing your name is crucial to help others to keep track of conversations, and to understand who holds which opinions.
Generally, your contributions to articles, help pages, policies, and other content pages should not be signed. Likewise it is not necessary to sign message wall posts, comments, or posts in Discussions, as these include your avatar, username, and time of post by default.
Below is an example signature:
ZeenMrala (she/her) 21:58, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
Adding a signature[]
To sign your name, type four tildes in a row: (~~~~)
In Source editor, the signature button (
) above the edit box can also be clicked to leave four tildes automatically.
This will show up by default as:
- Fandom 18:58, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
This example indicates that a user named "Fandom" left the signature at the time indicated.
You can use three tildes (~~~) to leave your name without a timestamp, or five (~~~~~) to leave a timestamp but no name.
Changing a signature[]
Your default signature will contain just your username, linked to your user page on the wiki where you signed it, and the timestamp:
- Example 10:42, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
You can change this signature to include a link to your message wall:
- Example (Message wall) 07:15, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
To do this, go to your Preferences, locate the Signature section on the first tab and check the I want to use wikitext in my signature checkbox. Then enter
- [[User:Example|Example]] ([[Message Wall:Example|Message wall]])
in the Custom signature field above the checkbox.
You can add other customizations to this signature, such as your pronouns, colored text, a funny name, a special font, etc. You can do this either by using wikitext in the custom signature field, or by substituting a subpage where you format your signature. To do that, create a subpage at Special:MyPage/sig (or any subpage of your userpage that is completely empty). Format your signature how you would like it. Then in your "Custom signature" field of your preferences, paste:
{{subst:User:USERNAME/sig}}
If you have created a subpage with a different name, put that different name instead, e.g. {{subst:User:USERNAME/mysignature}}.
Rules[]
Your signature must contain:
- Your username
- A link to your profile
- A link to your message wall
Additionally, it shouldn't be overly long. Ask yourself: would this be annoying to me if someone else had it? If so, don't do it!
Anonymous users and signatures[]
If you chose to edit on Fandom without logging in, but leave a signature, the tildes will be converted to your IP address. However, it can be easy to confuse two similar IPs in a conversation, so it may make more sense to manually sign your posts with a pseudonym or tag such as ―janedoe. Note that choosing not to sign with tildes does not keep your IP address private, since the IP still appears in the page history. If you wish for your address to be private, it is best to create an account.
This page contains content from Help:Signature.