Recent trends in avatar / sig image posting

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Recent trends in avatar / sig image posting

Postby lwf58 » Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:09 pm

Lately, I've been sending out far too many warnings about sigs and avatars that don't meet the size limits imposed by the forum rules. In an attempt to cut down on that, let's review.

Signature images should be under 100 pixels tall by 350 pixels wide of image size and 100kb of file size. Avatars are limited to 225 (height) by 140 (width) in size. and 100kb of file size. Animated avatars are allowed, but annoying ones will be subject to change. Animated avatars must meet the same criteria as non-animated avatars.


First off, the limits are absolute. That means that an avatar that measures 226 x 140 won't be permitted any more than one that's 300 x 140. That applies to file size as well. If it's over 100 kb, even if it's only by 1 kb, it won't be permitted. The same goes for signature images.

When I catch them -- and I will eventually, count on it -- I send out warnings to remove the image until it can be modified to comply with the rules. That means that you need to go into your forum profile and remove the image the next time you visit the site. If you put it off, then we're just going to edit your profile ourselves. If we do, and you upload the same oversized image again, you can rest assured that you'll be banned.

Lastly... Show some consideration for others in regards to the images. If it references religion, race, creed or sex in any way, it's probably going to be offensive to someone. So don't post that kind of image, no matter how innocent your intention might be. Keep the images neutral.

Non-hentai anime images and personal images, or photographs that do not touch on potentially offensive subjects are preferred. While these points are not spelled out in the rules, that's because they should be common sense. If I run across any more of them, we will edit the rules to ban such images. It's happened twice since I became a staffer, and that's two times too many.
Last edited by lwf58 on Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Neko- » Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:05 pm

Noted... I was aware of the image file dimensions, but have overlooked the size of the avatar... Never actually took that into consideration. That should now have been corrected.
Animated GIF's have a tendency to get rather big if you want to make it pretty... So it's still pretty... Just faster :P
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Postby Darth Thanatos » Thu Dec 07, 2006 11:06 pm

Profile Avatar Section wrote:Displays a small graphic image below your details in posts. Only one image can be displayed at a time, its width can be no greater than 140 pixels, the height no greater than 225 pixels, and the file size no more than 147 KB.

So, the max size is 100k or 147k? If someone doesn't remember at the moment of uploading it and goes with the figure in the profile section, he/she might get in trouble...
Fortunately, mine doesn't get close (100 X 75 and about 3K).
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Postby lwf58 » Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:09 am

That's something we overlooked. The stats from the rules are more recent, and take precedence. We'll see about editing the description in the profile settings to match. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Postby Siden » Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:08 am

Suggestion:
Might you possibly be interested in adding a maxiumum text limit to the signature limits? Something like nine lines of text at the default text size (this encludes spaces, images and large fonts).
The majority of forums I visit use twelve lines as the standard, but they also allow larger signature images. I scaled it down to nine to maintain the same size proportions. The cursor is about the size of a line of text (at least, it is on my screen), so that may help in determining legit sized signatures.
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Postby lwf58 » Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:44 am

There already is a limit on characters and spaces in sigs. It's not mentioned, but it's there. I haven't counted how many characters it is set for, but if you try to post something longwinded, you'll trip it.
It includes the code for sig images, too, so if you have a sig image and a text block, both will count toward the character/space limit.
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Thanks!

Postby Great Scott » Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:30 am

This is good to know. I appreciate the review of the rules that you've provided. This is one of the things that makes this site great - the attention to detail.
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Postby lwf58 » Mon Feb 05, 2007 5:53 am

And thank you for the appreciation note. We have a long list of rules, and it will probably get longer, but we hope that they make sense. Our intent is to make visiting this site and participating in the conversations as stress-free as possible for the greatest number of people.
Part of that is making rules that help keep the conversations from getting too confrontational.
Another part is remembering that not everyone has a broadband internet connection. If we banned sig and avatar images, it would make the site boring. But I always remember that every image adds quite a lot to the time an analog modem has to spend downloading before the page can be read.
For that reason, we came up with image size limits that help keep the page load times down a bit. It seems to be working, too. Or at least, no one who uses a modem has complained yet. Heaven knows that if I were on a modem (shudder!), I wouldn't touch the "It's Saturday..." thread in the Spamville folder!
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Postby Cheb » Fri Mar 09, 2007 2:21 pm

[cheb hastily checks his own pigeon-mounted avatar]
...nah. 120x160, 8kb. It pass.

By the way, the numbers above mean that
A). Skillful downsampling to "indexed" with proper settings does wonders :lol:
B). There *are* forums where the upper limit is 8 (eight) Kilobytes. So, I'd say, our Temple politics are still extremely forgiving. :)
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So, ppl, let's appreciate our recently rebuilt home and each other. It's really nice here. Ne?
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Is there a way to turn off viewing avatars & sig images?

Postby pspinler » Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:15 pm

For those of us who just find avatars and sig images a distraction (even on broadband),

Is there a way to turn off viewing avatars and signature images?

I briefly scanned my profile settings, but nothing jumped out at me as obviously doing this.

Thanks,
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Postby lwf58 » Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:40 pm

No, there isn't anything to allow that, either in the user controls or in the site admin panel.

Post this as a request in the site suggestions, and perhaps Stacy can answer whether or not that can be added to the site code.
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Postby Cheb » Sat Mar 10, 2007 7:43 pm

Is there a way to turn off viewing avatars and signature images?

How about the old good Right click on the image -> "Block images from this server" ?
At least, if you use Firefox.
Bloks the smilies too, though.
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Postby pspinler » Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:43 pm

Cheb wrote:How about the old good Right click on the image -> "Block images from this server" ?
At least, if you use Firefox.
Bloks the smilies too, though.


Actually, I mostly use adblock plus these days. It gives me a lot more discrimination over which images get blocked (all images matching a certain regex). Still, though, it's something I have to continually tune as new avatars / sigs are added referring to different servers...

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