Policy change - avatar and sig limits

[Champion of the Force]

On behalf of the staff I thought I'd just let the general posting body know that we've altered the policy in a good way (had to get that last bit out :) ).

Anyways:

Before:

* Avatars + signatures combined limited to a total of 30kb or less.

Now:

* Avatars limited to 15kb at 150x150 pixels (this has been in place ever since we moved to vBulletin for those who aren't aware - the limit is an integrated part of the board software)

* Signatures limited to 30kb.

Bascially the limit that was in place before now only applies to your signatures instead of both avatars AND signatures - effectively giving you all an extra 15kb to play with.

SO DON'T ABUSE IT.

I'll be updating the FAQ to include the change shortly, unless there is some protest over the change. :x

Take care.

- David aka. The Benevolent Dictator :mischief

[Champion of the Force]

:: sigh ::

Well there you go - all that effort to post the announcement and there is no one around to read it. :cry

[Marcus Telcontar]

Two words




Hell





Yeah





You rock guys

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Yay! *huggles Davey* Btw, is it true that you aren't yet 21? Somehow I thought you were older. O_o

And *I* am here to read it, so how can you say NO ONE?!?! :(

[Champion of the Force]

You rock guys

Yay! *huggles Davey*
Cheers. http://rpf.prop-planet.com/images/smiles/icon_cheers.gif


Btw, is it true that you aren't yet 21? Somehow I thought you were older.
I will be 21 on the date listed in my profile. As for thinking I'm older - yeah somewhere down the track some people got the misimpression I was older than Marcus here. :huh

[Marcus Telcontar]

That's not hard to work out if you see the way I act :)


(But still is odd, considering I'm just over 12 years older)



Mark aka the Aussie Juvenile Delinquent

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Davey is simply more mature than you. :D

[Champion of the Force]

:angel

[Marcus Telcontar]

And I have no problem with that whatsoever

[Lilaena De'Ville]

:lol well...maybe you SHOULD. :D

[Lady Vader]

YAY! Does this mean I'll stop getting PMs from Dale telling me that my piccys are too big? :D

[Q]

Nope. They're still huge. :p

[Gash Jiren]

Give them something that costs you nothing and they'll love you for it...

What a business model.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Does that thought of the day change every day? O_o

[Darth Lynch]

A nice change indeed.

[Dalethria Mal Pannis]

Yes LV .... you'll stop getting PM's from me about the sigs ... as long as they are resonable size that is :p

[Live Wire]

I only have one thing to say. *clears throat*



YAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY!!

[Taylor Millard]

:lol Well glad we can allow the larger sigs now.

[ReaperFett]

Not like you NEED a bigger sig :)

[Estelle Russard]

Hooray! *waves banner*:)

[Frank Harrigan]

Any chance you can bump that up to 300k? I don't think I've ever made a smaller sig

[Charley]

no

[Morgan Evanar]

Er... would your sig happen to be a movie or something? Maybe flash, complete with a song?

.jpg is a old standard, you know.

[TheHolo.Net]

Along with our more lenient rule regarding signature size, comes an all new implementation for those who abuse it repeatedly.

If you are asked by an Administrator or moderator on more than one occasion to downsize your sig, you will be placed on what we call “Signature Probation”. The period of the probation will be approximately two weeks. The details of being placed in that status means that you will have your signature removed from your profile and you will be unable to read it as your access to your control panel will become limited.

Another detail that will make you fully aware you are in this status is the fact that your user title will be changed for the duration of your probation to read “On Signature Probation”.

This is to help make the jobs the staff does here at our forums in enforcing the rules stated in our FAQ somewhat easier, so that they aren’t having to repeatedly admonish and or edit people who are not following the guidelines. With a little luck, such probation will not be required to be used, and everyone can enjoy the availability of a signature file and use it freely within the few rules we have established.

Thanks
~SWFans.Net

[Ogre]

This is an example post of someone on said probation. The account is unable to access either the Options or Preferences sections within the User Control Panel.

[TheHolo.Net]

As an aside, please remember that it is considered proper etiquette to only post your signature image once per thread in the OOC, RP, and ST forums.

[Sith Ahnk]

This is an example post of someone on said probation. The account is unable to access either the Options or Preferences sections within the User Control Panel.

How would they do about changing their sig?

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk


How would they do about changing their sig? They would have no signature and no way to change it until the probationary period had ended.

[Sith Ahnk]

Okay, I need to read your posts more clearly as you already said that
Is there a forum FAQ where users can find out how to change/diable their signature? (probably is, but me are stupid)
The mods/admins who do the warning should refer to such a page, if it exists

[Sith Ahnk]

Nevermind, I now see you said you had an FAQ
Way to go Sith Ahnk, 0 for 3

[TheHolo.Net]

vBulletin FAQ:
http://www.swforums.net/forum/misc.php?s=&action=faq

And an entire forum of SWFans.Net FAQs:
http://www.swforums.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=22

[Sith Ahnk]

I've actually read the FAQ forum before
*Damn concussions!*
Thank you anyway Mr. Dotnet

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk
Is there a forum FAQ where users can find out how to change/diable their signature? If someone has a signature that has exceeded the limitations then they definitely know how to add or modify their signature. And my comment about etiquette and only posting it once within a thread is actually slightly difficult to do accidentally since by default, in all but the initial starting post in a thread the checkbox to include a signature is not checked and it takes an actual concentrated effort to have it included by clicking the box.

[Sith Ahnk]

Not nesscessarily. They could have been shown how by someone helpful and no longer remember.
BTW, are you responsible for my Avatar no longer exploding into 4 times it's original proportion?

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk
Not nesscessarily. They could have been shown how by someone helpful and no longer remember.
BTW, are you responsible for my Avatar no longer exploding into 4 times it's original proportion? That is actually a good point. :eek :p

And nope, but I am glad to see it, I was going cross eyed staring at that blurry pic you had before. :p

[Sith Ahnk]

YOU'RE glad to see it...

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk
Not nesscessarily. They could have been shown how by someone helpful and no longer remember. Okay, I’ll actually take the time to give your point a proper response now.

A person in such a predicament is welcome to PM a Moderator or Administrator and inquire about how they may go about making the needed changes. If they have in their possession a link to a working valid signature file and they are currently on probation they can show the person whom they contact and be removed from the probationary status, and assisted in getting the signature added to their profile.

We are not above helping people around here and this new policy is only to help control those who would prefer to abuse rules than follow them, saving us the staff a few headaches in having to repeatedly admonish people like that. As I said before, hopefully just the fact that we now have such a policy will make it so that it does not have to be enforced, since just its existence may be enough to motivate people to follow the rules.

Its not like we are limiting them too badly. As I have said in the past, its fairly rare on vBulletin boards for images to even be allowed in signatures and definitely very uncommon for HTML to be allowed in them, so the rules we do have are not preposterous in my opinion, ands should not be too difficult to adhere to.

[Sith Ahnk]

Wow. You just love to do the right thing don't you.

[Shawn]

BTW, are you responsible for my Avatar no longer exploding into 4 times it's original proportion?That would be my doing. It was hurting my eyes. :) I saved the original, in case you didn't like it.

[TheHolo.Net]

Wow. You just love to do the right thing don't you.
Lets discuss the actual issues and make valid points that actually pertain to the situation please.

[Sith Ahnk]

It was nice and small when I hosted it... I think so anyway.

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk
It was nice and small when I hosted it... I think so anyway. vBulletin does not resize Avatar images, so I am not certain how it became distorted.

[Sith Ahnk]

Maybe I had it zoomed out in Photoshop?
I dunno... it came from a small PSD... I must have accidently exploded it.

[Sith Ahnk]

Originally posted by SWFans.Net
Lets discuss the actual issues and make valid points that actually pertain to the situation please.

That was me complimenting you by the way... and not srcastically
Although it sounded sarcastic, it wasn't
You guys have a lot of good policies
I really like it here
This is seeming
Oddly poetic
In way of
Line size

[TheHolo.Net]

Thank you for the explanation and the compliment. (thinks that is how he meant it) :p

[Sith Ahnk]

Try imagining that above post in ballad style, if just for ****s and giggles
As well... can we have a 45 k sig, and no avavtar?

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Sith Ahnk
As well... can we have a 45 k sig, and no avavtar? Rolls the majic eight ball over

"Signs point to no."

Most people's avatars are not at the maximum size in bytes, so I would really prefer that loopholes were not tossed around our declared policies.

[Shawn]

Nein. 30k is enough to make any reasonable sized image look fine and load fast. Plus, the avatars are stored locally, while sigs are not.

[Sith Ahnk]

effectively giving you all an extra 15kb to play with.

That was what made me ask
Not that I'm all that up in arms, I just made a 47 k sig and wondered if I could just chop two of..
*grumble*

And Nup that would make sense

[TheHolo.Net]

For people who had 15KB avatars, yes the change in policy from a 30KB total limit, to a 30 KB signature limit does give them an extra 15KB, but the removal of your avatar does not grant you an extra 15KB to play with. I have been known to make some very graphic intensive signatures and have never had too terrible a quality loss when compressing them to 30 Kb.

[Champion of the Force]

What SWFans said. Sorry if that statement of an extra 15kb led to a bit of confusion there. :\

[Sith Ahnk]

Not your fault I'm easily confused, I'm Canadian
Okay, I'll cut my sigs down to 30 k.

[Integra Hellsing]

Some associates and myself will be doing some fanifiction/role play writing where we will not be using signatures but we will be using images within our posts to help visualize the story.

Its an approach I have seen no one else here use, and I hope that our methods are acceptable. We have taken into consideration the 30 KB signature rule and within each of our posts our included images should not exceed 30 KB at any time. The way were are planning it now, each post to the topic will contain roughly 15 to 18 KB worth of images.

If there is any problem with this approach please let me know in a post here, or @ integrawhellsing@yahoo.com , or even by use of the private messaging system found here, and we will see what kind of arrangements can be made to rectify the issue.

The topic has been started and you can see an example of what I mean here.

http://www.swforums.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12189

[Dalethria Mal Pannis]

:: reads it ::

I think as long as you make sure the total amount of images used in each post is around 30k, I see no problem with it.

We got a couple of people that change their sig pictures around for RPing and they follow the 30k rule.

:)

[Seras Victoria]

Originally posted by Dalethria Mal Pannis
:: reads it ::

I think as long as you make sure the total amount of images used in each post is around 30k, I see no problem with it.

We got a couple of people that change their sig pictures around for RPing and they follow the 30k rule.

:) Will do. Thank you for letting us do our comic style fanfic/role play here. :)