Commons:Userboxes

A userbox (commonly abbreviated as UBX) is a small colored box designed to appear on a Commoner's user page as a notice about the user. Userboxes generally include one or two small graphics and a few short lines of text. Sometimes they also include wiki markup that places the user in a category. Userboxes are generally created as templates and transcluded onto userpages, although their markup may be substituted directly onto userpages instead. Userboxes should not be used in galleries or on image pages. They are for the use of users on their own user pages.

The first userboxes were introduced to support the Babel inter-language effort, to indicate users' skills in other languages.

Using userboxes

The standard syntax for adding a userbox to your user page (also known as transclusion) is: {{user name_of_box}}. You may decide to substitute the template code onto your user page using the syntax {{subst:user name_of_box}}. The use of "subst:" will ensure that the template is always displayed in its form when you add it to your user page, i.e. it will not reflect subsequent edits to the template. However, this method may lead to large amounts of code on your user page.

Many people like to display their userboxes on the right-hand side of their user pages. For language userboxes, use the {{#babel}} extension. For other userboxes, you can use Babel or use the template-pair {{Boxboxtop}} and {{Userboxbottom}}.

Creating userboxes

When creating new userboxes, they should follow the standard naming scheme of "user something". This requirement only applies to those in the template namespace. This allows them to work with certain templates, such as {{Babel}}, and for easy recognition of the template's purpose. It also helps avoid naming conflicts. Outside the template namespace, other naming conventions may be used. Common ones include "ubx something" or as a subpage "userboxes/something".

Location

Userboxes exist in both the template namespace and the user namespace. All personal userboxes should be made as a subpage of the creator's userpage (e.g. User:Example/userbox). The advantage of this is that it keeps the template namespace manageable and helps avoid other problems that certain Wikimedia projects have encountered in the past. The disadvantage is that it's slightly less convenient in that the user must include the namespace to use it (e.g. {{user something}} vs. {{User:Example/user something}}).

If the template namespace is used, it's strongly encouraged that the boxes in some way aid in collaboration. Exceptions are allowed as long as these are kept to a minimum. For example, things like {{User rock}} are usually acceptable since ~~you can't stop the rock~~ it is at least in someway related to Commons (that being a recent meme of some sort). However, generally these type of userboxes should be kept to the userspace. Note that this is not a policy or even a guideline, just some advice to avoid the need for one. Let's learn from our sister projects. We're better anyway.