I have a couple complaints about them...
1. Why are there people that have sigs bigger then the limit...and they've gotten off with it for a while? Like Gabe's, no offence, but it takes up most of my screen...
2. If you are allowed to have 500x150 pixels of picture and 10 lines of text....then why can't i have 20 lines of text and no picture, like Saru said?

Thanks,
Janiel

The trouble with enforcing the size limits, is that unless I see the person with an oversized signature, then it's not going to get removed. I know i've probably missed a lot of them, what does help is members using a bit of common sense when it comes to their signatures, but it's clearly not happening in some cases. Perhaps if members can report oversized signatures it would help get the worst ones removed.

The size in bytes of signatures is being experimented on, it was changed a couple of days ago to stop people using enormous chunks of text, which is why 20 lines will no longer fit. I will update the signature guidelines thread shortly.

I'm also going to start replacing oversized signatures with a warning and link to the guidelines thread. It still baffles me why anyone would need text the length of a small novel or wallpaper sized picture under every single post they make on the forum. That's not what the signature space is for.

Thank you, SaRu, you answered everything perfectly.

Personally, I hate signatures that have both multiple pictures and text. For me, if I were ever to have one, it would either be a small picture or a line or two of text. Just like a real signature on a written letter, I wouldn't want my note on the bottom to be longer than the note itself.

Good for you. But, others consider it a form of self expression.

'Self-expression' is no excuse for a 500x700 pixel image....
When any person with common sense should look in the "Web Site & Forum News, Updates & Support" section for guidelines....

True, true. But still. If they want the pic there, it should be allowed.

Maybe on some forums, like ones that don;'t have a general topic and are made for spamming and other generall off topic stuff. (Try ZenHex, it's a general off topic forum based around it's quizzes.) Forum's like that i can understand a lack of a signature guideline.

Other forums, like UM, are more formal and kept together. thus putting filters like swearing, avatar sizes, and signature sizes. Personally, i don't wanna scroll through people's wallpaper sized signatures. I'd rather scroll through their posts.

psssst....is mine too big?

nope
500x150 pixels, 41k your good

A member's signature is not meant to be used for that, to use it to display enormous graphics is not fair on everyone else. Most people find it annoying to scroll past huge images in every single post made by the same person, and large images also take ages to load on slower dial-up connections. For example I removed one signature this morning which consisted of nothing but a series of screenshots from a game that took up so much space I had to scroll down the page to get from one end of it to the other.

A lot of forums have guidelines restricting the size of user signatures, in fact some of them remove the option to use images in signatures at all. We shouldn't have to resort to doing that here though if everyone co-operates.

mine isnt too weighty, is it?

No it's fine.

I can never get a pic in my signature

What picture do you want for your signature?

I think i will stay with no pic i seem to like it more i hate having to much color

I need some help getting an image into my sig....

I made a banner for myselfand gave it a URL here so that I could link it to my sig. However, every time I try, it says that I can't have a "dynamic" link, or something like that, between the [IMG] tags. HELP!

Nobody can deny how awesomeo my sig is. I don't know if it breaks the limit, but it tends to fit in any forum I'm in.

Since it's not an image uploaded onto the server, and you're hosting it yourself, I dunno if that still applies or not. You're right about the coolness factor though.

I don't think Yahoo briefcase will work as an image host for this unfortunately, as far as i know they don't support remote linking.



It's dimensions are ok, but it's filesize is a bit on the large side. At the moment it's 3 times larger than the limit, probably because it's an animated GIF.

Nice image though.

Well, it's not hosted by you, and I'm sure Photobucket has faster connection speed as it has multiple servers. I think that it should compensate a bit.


I made me sig myself.

The reason for the filesize limit is to help speed up loading times for dial up users, it's nothing to do with bandwidth usage.

On dialup, it dosen't take that long to load, I believe.

It takes 20 times longer to load than someone with broadband, and when coupled with everything else on the page significantly increases the total load time for people on dial up.

To help those who do not have a fast internet connection there is a limit of 50k on signature image sizes.

I'm afraid this cap applies to everyone.

So, if it loads instantly on my broadband, it has to go 20x slower than instantly...

It doesn't load "instantly" on your broadband, it might be so fast you don't notice a delay but it is not instant.

For someone with dial-up who can only manage 4k/sec thats 37 seconds, just to load your signature.

I can personally 'amen brother' to that. I just switched from dial-up to broadband and the difference is amazing. It took forever to load everything and sometimes it would just wear me out waiting.

Maybe you need a 'signature police squad'. I'll volunteer and maybe a few others could as well. Just start with A and go through the member list to Z. When you find one that is out of bounds notify Saruman.
The Sig Police. Just a thought.

....I'm sure there are others liken unto myself who were not even aware that a size limit exists.

Same here, broadband only became available to me a couple of months ago and it's amazing how much faster it is than 56k dial-up. I want to make things as quick as possible for those still stuck on a slow connection.



It's a nice idea Joc, I don't think we'd need to go through every member account because only a small percentage of the overall registered member count have a signature. What i'm going to do is include additional notices in the signature change section of the control panel so that everyone knows about the guidelines at the point when they are changing their signature.

Rather than go through everyone on the forum, other members could help out by reporting oversized signatures so that we know about them. That should see to it that the worst ones get removed.

Ok.... then where CAN I link from.... I've been looking all over the place. I used to use mywebpage.netscape.com but it won't let me log in anymore....

I guess I'll have to make a still version of mine.

Ok... at least I found a site that worked.... it's not perfect, but it worked.

A little annoyed that my sig was removed...it was only 50 over the limit.

Why was mine removed when others' pictures are twice as large...not to mention paragraphs of text...

It was still over the limit, that's 25% larger than it's supposed to be. The limit applies to everyone.

I realise that there are some people with large amounts of text in their signatures, i'm working on as fair a way as possible to restrict that. Some excessively long textual signatures have already been removed.

If you know of anyone else with an oversized signature image, let me know.

Okie dokie, how's this one?

Yup thats fine

Groovy, thanks

Try Photobucket.com