Wikipedia:Signatures: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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* Certain automated scripts (bots) are used to automatically archive particularly active talk pages. These bots read the source of the talk page, but don't transclude templates, and so don't recognize the template as a signature.

* Signature templates are a small but unnecessary drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing--whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be [[Web cache|re-cached]].

* [[WP:SUBST|Substitution]] of templates in signatures is discouragedalso not allowed, as any such template will typically either will violate the [[#Length|reasonable length restriction of 255 characters]] or will be redundant to using the same content as a [[#Customizing your signature|raw signature]].

Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content and use no more resources than the comments themselves, avoid these problems.