[RANT] I know it's been said before but...

[LightPhoenix]

Here's a question for thought. Does the size of a sig influence the speed of the boards? In other words, if sigs were limited to text only and a certain number of characters, would that increase the speed and stability of the boards?

In theory, yes. Any time you have images, that adds a degree of overhead. If you got rid of images in signatures, removed avatars and post icons, that would again in theory help the boards.

Would that boost be anything more than marginal? Probably not. Right now, what ENWorld needs is a better server, and while Morrus and crew can keep making the boards more efficient, the site is just going to keep growing. Of course, more bandwidth never hurts, but I think the server is the more important thing, and probably cheaper at this stage too.

 

[Heretic Apostate]

I've kept my sig as small as possible, and tried to make sure it's subtle.

I browse with both sigs and avatars turned off, to get a better signal-to-noise ratio. But I wish there was a way to view sigs and avatars of individuals, without having to go to the User CP, click on Options, choose to enable them, then go back to the thread, refresh the screen, see the sig/avatar, then go through the whole process to turn them off again.

Are people's avatars and sigs stored in their profile, perhaps?

 

[Sniktch]

Sigs often contain something that makes me laugh, or links to Story Hours, or advertisements for products, or other handy things. I first found the Story Hour forum by clicking a link in Ziona's sig. I've only seen one or two that struck me as too long recently, but I have seen a few that were too wide. That can be a little annoying, as then I have to scroll over a bit to see all the text. The middle mouse button helps out, though.

I'm set to 800x600 right now and you're right, RW, the current banner is just wide enough that I have to scroll to see the last little bit.

 

[Zappo]

Aren't images on signatures stored on people's own hosting, rather than the enworld server? They shouldn't impact the server's speed itself (though of course, the person viewing the thread still has to load them).

 

[LightPhoenix]

Aren't images on signatures stored on people's own hosting, rather than the enworld server? They shouldn't impact the server's speed itself (though of course, the person viewing the thread still has to load them).

Doh, true dat yo. I'm dumb.

 

[Jarval]

Heh. I even made me a "don't blame Piratecat - blame me" sig pic once. Somebody else like it so much that they used it.

You mean this one?

And yeah, it was me who used it in my sig

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Just to let people know, you can look at people's sigs and avatars, without turning them back on, by clicking on their name to get that drop-down menu. So that saves me some steps.

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

I've never thought something was to big but I do try to keep mine small as I never remember to turn if off after multiple posts. (I can only seem to remember in the IC section.)

 

[woodelf]

Sadly, everyone has a different gauge of what is "too long". I think 6 lines of text is too long. Anything less than that space (including pictures) is fine with me.

you *do* realize that your .sig attached to that ~3line message was roughly 11 lines long?

 

[woodelf]

While we're on this topic... do I need to shorten my sig at all? Seems a good size to me, but then I have a biased opinion.

seems perfect to me: 4 lines, small text, not too long.