The explanatory text was removed because two of us felt that the manner in which it was given to the user was quite annoying (pre-pasted into the message composition window such that every user with a signature would have to delete the lengthy text every time they replied until they took the time to update their signature).

It would have been nice if an alternate manner would have been provided to point users to an explanation, such as the patch author or applier describing it in a reply in the PMD thread that spawned the idea and adding a link to that reply in the patch (which could later be transposed into a sitedocclan node).

But I didn't write nor apply any of these patches and so was not much involved with the whole thing other than kibitzing from the sidelines.

The explanatory text was removed because two of us felt that the manner in which it was given to the user was quite annoying (pre-pasted into the message composition window such that every user with a signature would have to delete the lengthy text every time they replied until they took the time to update their signature).

Oh dear. It seems my comment was interpreted as being a negative one. Not my intention.

But it is true that I do disagree with the decision. I see the message my original patch would have provided as being signifigantly less annoying than simply having the new tags added without any explanation.

But as I feel a touch of responsibility for the present state of affairs Ill look into a patch along the lines you've suggested. Perhaps when the form is constructed a note could be added underneath if the tags have been automatically added pointing to the documentation of the feature?



---
demerphq



First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi

Oh dear. It seems my comment was interpreted as being a negative one.

*shrug* I was just presenting my interpretation of the situation. I didn't assume your comment was "negative" or not. Rereading what I wrote, I'm not sure where you read me taking your comment as negative, but that doesn't really matter. I'm not sure how you "took" my comment, but I apologize if it distressed you.

The pmsig CSS features could certainly use some improvement, but the princepawn/PodMaster incident has shown that it is already useful, even important. I don't think one can yet safely hide all signatures, but one can certainly manipulate the presentation of many individuals' signatures.

Some help text, some links to it, and a warning (with such a link) when someone previews a node having all (or nearly all?) of their node contents within the tags would probably go a long way toward making it possible to manipulate all signatures (and it is the most direct route I've heard toward that end).

For newly-created signatures (or those still without the tags added), the "cut-n-paste this as your new signature" would be handy, yes. One could probably even emit a form that allowed moving bits around and, when submitted, updates the signature without the need for cut-n-paste nor a trip to user settings, but I'm not sure on the details of that (unfortunately, some user settings-related code made some bad desicisions [that I hope to correct but haven't] about how to determine when a parameter is "empty" and so you can clean out lots of settings by sending a partial form to user settings) and I'm certainly not saying that such is "required" or worth the effort or even that it would be the best approach -- the devil is in the details and those are best dealt with by the author and applier.

Once such is in place, a one-time run to remove these CSS tags from old nodes where the tags surround the entire contents would be the next step. This could be done via the database (some Perl code run by one of the gods) or via editors' power and an external script (which is probably the better option since this method would also record the changes in the editors' change log).

I would appreciate anyone working on any of these changes. SiteDocClan should probably help write the explanatory text (they have standardized a style, etc.), at least eventually. Someone (sorry, I don't recall who) already wrote a script that scrapes nodes finding those that should be updated and I think more than one person has written external scripts to batch apply updates via editors' powers. So I don't think you need to do this alone.

                - tye

thanks for the tip! i've changed it successfully.

damn the gods! how was i supposed to know it worked this way unless somebody told me, or i could read it myself? i guess sometimes they forget their own omniscience :-) wait... is that even possible? oh well....

as Aristotle commented, this can be done with multiple classes in one tag, but i don't know how older browsers handle that.