* Sigs are signatures!, not full blown art works and even not banners!. They can be "a piece of art" or they can contain a small banner, but the purpose of a sig is not to be highres "artwork" or a full blown site banner.
* Complaints about sig space are mostly done by people who don't seem to be able to put the text/art/whatver they want in a small size. Learn to be creative, use a decent graphic editors, use your imagination. 75% of all sigs I see can be made much smaller, yet containing all the visual elements as the original and be as good looking (or even better).
* People who say they need +200px height sigs need to learn how to create appealing graphics and need to learn what a sig is. Sorry to be so blunt, but this needs to be said.
* Large sigs can be (heck, they always are) very distracting, and a forum isn't an art gallery. The main purpose of a forum is to read posts, not to stare at massive sigs made in paintbrush and to scroll constantly to read 3 posts.
* Small sigs encourage creativity.
* Signatures become very overwhelming in comparison to post content if too big.
* In case of 1 line posts, it is a big no-no if sigs enlarge the total used space for a post even more. But this doesn't mean there is currently space available. True, if you use the maximum allowed avatar height, the userbit table is the biggest element. But as it is now, the total size of an average sig vs. the average userbit table is perfect.
* The empty space before/after a sig is very welcome, and as Gif83 has said, is very welcome for a "breather". Not everything needs to be crammed together.
* Many sigs are just 1 big word or couple of words. Why do they need to be so high???? We do can read normal print too, we are not blind.
* Why do you _have_ to use all the available space for a sig???
* Do people like bloating their sigs with information about themselves or homebrew creativity? Yes. But that doesn't mean limits should increase at all. It means those people need to learn how to be creative and even how to link to a page with their bloats if needed. Are such bloated big sigs usefull? Absolutely not and they even cause more aggrivation to the serious reader than causing "joy" to the "spammer".
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examples:
MR_5_MR:
http://shoutbox.menthix.net/showthread.php?tid=50...d=530509#pid530509
You could easly make that sig 10 even 20px or more smaller and still have all the visual impact it has now. Even if you don't want to do that, the space between the topsticker and the logo can also be decreased.
mandorallen:
http://shoutbox.menthix.net/showthread.php?tid=50...d=530475#pid530475
No offense though, but your sig is a nice example of 1 word sigs, which could easly be made smaller. (So, I'm not saying yours is too big, cause it isn't, it's just a nice example of 1 word sigs)
John Anderton:
http://shoutbox.menthix.net/showthread.php?tid=50...d=530678#pid530678
Another example of 1 word sigs with a "lets make a massive size background just for the heck of it". This one will loose nothing of its appeal if it is even simply cropped by a few pixels. (Again, no offense, and yours isn't too big at all. It is just to show some complainers that you can crop down sigs without loosing anything.)
How bad it can get:
Look on mess.be. Without throwing mud to mess.be or the admins/mods, but the "sig policy" there is one of the reasons that mess.be is hard to read for a serious poster and the allowance of sig massive sigs just increases the feeling of "spamming" also. I don't have anything against such stuff on some forums, but is mess.be suppose to be a spam forum or a informative forum? Luckaly it has been approved a bit by the new policy, but still... What I mean is, on a forum which has no real purpose and is mostly used to chitchat, I don't have any problems with massive sigs or even spam for that matter, but not on forums which are suppose to be informative. If I want to chitchat/spam I don't care about massive sigs either, if I want to learn/research/whatever, I don't want a 500px height sig with no usefull info what-so-ever besides the user's name in big bold to stare at me.
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quote:
Originally posted by Lee Jeffery
quote:
Originally posted by John Anderton
"it'd be a pain to 56kers"
that just doesnt make any sense at all, as sigs that are too big are simply hidden but they still load :/
Sigs which are too big will not only be hidden by the CSS style, they will also be reported and removed, because of the filesize or because of their useless hieght.
quote:
Originally posted by KeyStorm
To why it should be increased: Most boards have 150+px height. If I create a sig for those, it will be a pain in the ass to specifically create one for these. As I said, I misleadedly thought this board allowed 150px height.
150+ is IMO also too big. Besides, that, as said, make your sig smaller to begin with so there aren't any problems. Why should a sig _need_ to be the maximum allowed size?
quote:
Originally posted by KeyStorm
If people don't want to see sigs because they have a low resolution or a slow connection, they can always disable them from the CP.
Why should those people be forced in removing (possible usefull) forum elements (this goes also for the argument of "disable sigs if you don't want to see them"? Besides that, what do you call a low resolution? 1024x786 is the most common used resolution. And even on that resolution, a 150px makes it that there is only space for 1 small post in the immediate view of your browser. Not to mention what happens when you have +150 sigs and/or a smaller resolution. A forum is a place where posts are the most important part, not sigs...
quote:
Originally posted by KeyStorm
1. HTML loads before images, and in proper browsers it should show before.
Even in proper browsers it will not show (decently) before the html. This is because a browser doesn't know how high and width the pic is going to be. Hence you see the page jumping around _and_ post anchors (which are a very important element in forums) don't work properly (because they are loaded before pictures because they are HTML) and the larger the pics are the less accurate the anchors become.
quote:
Originally posted by KeyStorm
2. Signatures are usually cached.
true and "solves" filesizes, but not the even more important readablility.
quote:
Originally posted by KeyStorm
4. I'm just asking for a 20% more, not dozens of times higher.
You ask for 20%, next month someone else ask for yet 10% more, etc...
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Now to the original reason why this thread was made:
It is a good and nice idea to try to do something with unused space and solve the "cropped sig" problem. I'm all for it. But the space in front of a sig shouldn't be touched IMHO. As for regaining the space occupied by the "IP logged" message, I agree.
As for, while "fixing" that, increasing the sig space to 150px, I totally don't agree. Removing the IP isn't a reason to increase sig size at all IMO, and only justifies the actions of people who are too lazy (or incapable) to make some decent informative-forum-like sigs.
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