Signature sizes and smooth sailing

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

Too big or under the limit?
@ Neal I got the postal-mailz from you. Thanks.

Hilarious, and it doesn't affect me, but at 1MB, it probably slows things down for a lot of people. Especially if 10 other people in the thread have similar gifs: 10MB+ on each page view

Originally Posted by HunterICX

Yes, size does matter.

while some might go perhaps 20% over the allowed limits I'm fine with that but let's not have it going out of hand so that the forum lay out starts to get screwed or when I have to abuse my mouse scroll just to get to the next member's post.

I think the current dimensions are perfect.

as for filesize leave it 200 - 300kb top.
1 Mb Gif files are uncalled for at while they won't bother me at home on my own PC but at work on a not so state of the art pc it does bother me as big animated gif files just lag the browser and makes it a pain to navigate a thread.

HunterICX

Yeah, the vertical scroll does affect me. That's the reason for some kind of x pixels high limit, agreed.

Originally Posted by Skybird

I have "two shoes that don't match"...? I assume that is an English proverb. But I do not know what it means, Neal. I never used pics, only coloured text. I never got any pics working in signatures. I change colour when I changed the text, which I do often: whenever I remembered or stumbled over a new - or new old - quote that I like.

On the issue, there should be size limits. Since it is about scrolling a thread, it mostly matters regarding vertical dimension, and thus I think a sig, may it be graphic or text, should not be thicker than 3-4 lines of text. Many, if not all forums I monitor, have limits much tighter handled than over here.

Lol, no, it's no proverb. Often my announcements will include some random nonsense about one of the notable forum members. Last time it was Sailor Steve. Again, I agree with you on the verticle dimension.

Originally Posted by flostt

I find it annoying if a signature occupies much more space than the actual mesage in the post.

If a single post covers half of your screen and I have to look for the message hidden somewhere above a large signature
(which might even contain animations), I tend to get so distracted that I don't really process what I'm reading.

And regarding political sigs. 99.9% are fine, but that rule is in place for someone who abuses it, with hate speech or some Rush Limbaugh quotes.

One thing I want to stress: I personally do not want to be the sig police, and I am fine with letting things slide. But I do know that if we collectively go to extremes with sigs, it will really make reading threads a pain, so there has to be some limits, somewhere. I wanted to take the pulse and see how you felt about it.

[STEED]

I have to scroll left to right only because my zoom is set on 172% as I have no interest sitting to near my monitor screen which in the past has given me a headaches.

As for sigs in general I'm not that bothered about them unless they are over the top.

My Eagle sig is 15.6kb, 452x125 pixels Jpeg.

[Stiebler]

Neal's question reminds me of the old philosophical problem concerning litter:

If *I* drop litter, it will make no difference to the world. My contribution is too small.
If *everyone* drops litter, the world will be submerged in litter.

Therefore people in general cannot be allowed to drop litter.
Since I am part of 'people', I cannot be allowed to drop litter.

The same principle surely applies to large signatures:
If everyone is allowed to do it, SubSim will grind to a halt.
Since therefore everyone cannot be allowed to post large signatures, no one person can be allowed to do so either.

That is logical. I think. I have voted accordingly.

Stiebler.

[SilentOtto]

Nice people use only one or two text lines as a sig!

[TLAM Strike]

As long as they are not wider or taller than the screen its fine with me.

[Tchocky]

It's been years since I disabled signatures, I find the forums easier and more "natural" to read without them.

[Herr-Berbunch]

All those who disable sigs - you're missing out on so much*





*if you follow Dowly

[aanker]

I have plenty of bandwidth and pages load fast - it is the people on slower connections especially any on dial-up I would be concerned about which is why I voted 'occasionally' - However, those on dial-up probably have graphics disabled so..........

Some are just too big as mentioned above - I don't like scroll bars unless it is important.

Happy Hunting!

[SilentOtto]

Today, the bigger problem is not bandwith (though it can be on many cases, rural areas, mobile connections with pay-per-data-volume), but screen real space. It's a real PITA to browse pages with a small screen, and even more if half the space is filled with sigs...

[Rockin Robbins]

Width, I don't see as too much of a problem, so long as it doesn't make people side scroll to see it all. It should all show on the same page. The present level 0f 640 is unnecessarily low, as it is a rare individual who is looking at Subsim with under 1024x768 resolution. You can see where I'm going: 900x220 makes sense.

HunterICX's signature is a perfect illustration why going to 900 is no worse than 640. The whole bottom line, blank space included, is taken by the signature anyway, isn't it?

So I suggest 900x220. That's full available width minus 10 or so and 220 high.

[RHR]

It matters not to me,all you have to do is scroll past it,not like you have to run 10k to get past it.I think if the forum has rules about the size follow it,if not then i guess its not that big of a prob.

[flatsixes]

Signatures only bother me if they contribute to global warming, like Dowly's.
Bothered, but not minding.

The sigs sizes aren't to much of a problem for me, just keep them reasonable and I'm fine.

To bad the forums didn't have [Spoiler] tags, however, so people could have larger pixel wise sigs without making threads a pain to scroll through.

[CCIP]

Just for the record, too, I LIKE signatures. I think they're a cool thing and a great bit of creativity and design when people do them well. Those Torplexed-made sigs for example - pure gold! But I think efficiency and reasonable compactness are part of good design too.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by RHR

I think if the forum has rules about the size follow it

So, why is yours bigger than the rules allow?