User talk:Mingos

Hiya, just a quick FYI - If you type four tildes (~~~~), it'll insert a time/dated signature in your comment when you hit the post button. Note that in most areas of the wiki, signatures are only used on discussion pages (as opposed to main articles).

- Bomb Bloke 19:42, 14 December 2009 (EST)

Any way to force the Wiki to display my local time? My preferences are set up correctly with respect to this, but I still get Eastern Standard Time instead of Central European Time in the time signature... Mingos 20:16, 14 December 2009 (EST)

Sorry, no. Once you make your post the tildes change to "plain text", and can't be dynamically altered from there. If everyone's individual sig was using their local time, users would have a right pain trying to mentally translate when each person posted relative to everyone else... So to save on this frustration, signatures just use one global time zone setting across the board.

For example, reading this page as it is, it's easy for you to see that I posted again within about five minutes of your reply. :)

- Bomb Bloke 20:21, 14 December 2009 (EST)

Discussions are usually ordered in "threads" and indented to separate the posts, so one needn't the signature to guess the chronology. I think it's more valuable info to know what one's time zone is, for instance, to estimate when you can expect a reply. Mingos 20:28, 14 December 2009 (EST)

Usually discussions are layed out as you say, but indents allow us to interject midway in a post or even a conversation - the time stamps are essential to understanding things in such situations (compare this to a forum, where you'd use the quote function instead). Personally I think indents are messy and prefer the forum way of doing things!

But that's just the way the wiki software works. The signature code would need a revamp to get it to operate the way you're thinking. One way would be to have the wiki software recognise the signature text in a page and re-write the time stamps according to the user settings.

I suppose the way to go would be to head over to the original wiki site (where the software for this one comes from) and see if they have a "feature suggestion" page or something.

Come to think of it, wiki extensions do exist - perhaps one of those offers such a feature? You'd need to get one of our admins with server access to install it, but that's the most realistic solution.

- Bomb Bloke 20:57, 14 December 2009 (EST)