Topic: Signature Images

[AmberStarfire]

Hi,

I just wondered, is there any way you might consider increasing the number of images allowed in our signatures so we have additional ability to pretty them up?

:)

I think it's at 5 currently?

[Ember Star]

I totally second this notion! I needs more than five! :0

[MagicalPen]

I think the limit is partly due to bandwidth that other users may have, so it doesnt take hours to loud up a page?

[jouzinka]

Whatever the new limit, it will never be enough. :-D

I think that a few more site-supported fonts might serve better in this and the creative minds of Elliquiians. :)

[Lord Mayerling]

jouzinka's suggestion is a good one. A lot of signatures here are too busy and could use the rubric 'less is more'.

Also keep in mind you can simply turn signatures off, which I will do if the limit of images is expanded. It's getting silly.

[Haloriel]

Whatever the new limit, it will never be enough. :-D

I think that a few more site-supported fonts might serve better in this and the creative minds of Elliquiians. :)

+1!  I would love more fonts.  Maybe stick that in the CMS request, jouzi if you have not?  But oh goodness, please no more images in the signatures.

[Ember Star]

Yeah, I always figured the load time was why they did that, and the simple text space and height and width the signature allowed. Though I also always thought that if you kept them within the 500x100 pixel limit and the 1000 character limit all together, maybe it wouldn't make much difference? Not sure.

[AmberStarfire]

Fonts don't sound like a bad idea, though I'd prefer images. You don't ask, you don't get, right? (Not that I necessarily expect to, but it doesn't hurt to ask).

There's an option to encourage caching you can put on the .htaccess file that's probably enabled already, but that makes it more likely browsers will cache images (so it might decrease the bandwidth needed for downloads of them). You ought to be able to tell it from the response headers.

[Oreo]

You never know. It's possible more images could be added if people kept to the 500px limit. That is supposed to include all five pictures, not 500px each. ; )

[Ember Star]

*nods* Exactly what I was thinking. I had previously made 50 pixel wide badges for some of my personal pages thinking I'd get more in there if it was within 500 altogether. But that was when I found out we could only have 5 images. I was a little crushed. LOL.

[jouzinka]

Hehe.

One also needs to bear in mind that people access E from all kinds of mobile devices and on all kinds of mobile networks. The site needs to be accessible for them as well. I think that all of E (ie text) loads after all images do, which, on mobile network can be like forever and it's the reason why things in sigs need to be uploaded to the wiki first. There were too many instances of other hostings not responding and E not loading for users.

Personally, I think that this is a literary forum. If we were a drawing/painting/computer graphics community, I think we could definitely use a more colorful sigs. But we're not and excessive images disrupt the flow (for some people). Plus, there are so many options how to make your sig interesting with the text options available. For example, Caeli is and has been a stellar example for me of a text sig done exactly right.

I am absolutely not saying that there shouldn't be an option for more images in sigs. I'm just saying that there already are options how to make visually appealing signatures, they just aren't being used to their fullest.

[Ember Star]

oh, I know. I'm one of the ones on a mobile device. I don't even have access to a computer, just my old (2 and a half year old) android phone stuck on android 2.2. So I totally get the load time stuffs. I have major problems loading something threads like Christa McGinn's model thread because of all the pics. I just happen to enjoy shiny siggy badges. But I agree that a signature can get far too busy. Especially the ones which mix three or more images AND a lot of text. It never looks right to me, and half the time either a image or part of the text isn't visible because it's just too much to show. Sometimes this can be fix by arranging and coding it perfectly. But not always and it tends to be a lot of trouble. Which is why I only have images in mine.

[MagicalPen]

I operate on the forums with Avatars turned off and Sigs only display in the the first post each person makes in a thread. Cuts down on load times in general, especially when on my phone.

[Ember Star]

Yeah, signatures only display on the first post on a page for me too. But avatars are on. I don't have major loading problems with small images. Mainly big ones, even if they're sized down with with the image code or under a spoiler, they can still be difficult to load big images or a lot of images.