Signature limits

[tanuki]

Hi there!

Once in a while signatures with big pictures appear. And I mean HUGE pictures.

I know there are size limits in the rules, but I wonder if it's possible to put a limit to the uploading size instead of having to tell them "your sig. is too big!".

So, when you want to upload a picture that's larger than allowed, it would tell you "picture is too large" or something.

I know it's not a big deal, but it's just a suggestion.

[richvh]

Since signature images (unlike avatars) are externally hosted, I don't think there's a way to do that.

[tanuki]

Ah... I never noticed there was a difference between the two (I guess because I never tried to have a signature with an image).

[Infidel]

Kind of funny, I was just thinking to make the same suggestion.

At the eqii forums the sigs are externally hosted as well but they are auto-limited. I strongly suspect it is by putting a hard limit on the height of the signature field itself. Over there the max height was 100px. It could be text pictures or both, but once it went over 100px it got clipped.

[LordOfTheFlies]

richvh wrote:
Since signature images (unlike avatars) are externally hosted, I don't think there's a way to do that.

You can retrieve all sorts of information from images using php... So it shouldn't be a problem. The question is whether someone wants and/or can do it.

[charizardpal]

Incidently...when I tried putting the picture in my signature as my avator, the image never displayed correctly. So I've given up on that and decided that a picture in my signature is as good as having one in my avator.


Now back to the topic:

I see why a limit could be useful for administrators, but it's still quite annoying when you're trying to upload a picture for a signature and the site won't upload it because it's a couple of pictures or Killabytes too big. Then you have to spend about 10 minutes scaling the picture down, shrinking it to various widths/lengths, and perhaps converting it back into a jpeg when you're done all because of an arbitary resolution restriction. The most annoying thing is that this restriction varies amoung forums, and a picture that's fine on one forum needs to be scaled down on another to upload.

Unless there gets to be a big problem with signatures, I think it'd be best just to deal with these things on a case by case basis.

Because I remember signing up at a forum, posting a single post and then leaving. (I had become bored with the subject-matter.) A half-year later I returned and rather than responding to what I wrote, a bunch of people were complaining that my signature was too big. Geez, get a life. It's only one post! If I'm not coming back to the forum or posting again then why bother to make such a fuss.

Instead of installing a code to prevent users from uploading large images I'd recomend that if someone has a big avator and posts a few times then you could just PM them to shrink it. It's sorta like those visual-code confirmation things with the random letters/numbers/kanji (on japanese sites) which tend to frustrate us in greater and greater frequency just because someone was too paranoid over bots, instead of createing a simple 'click here if you're human tab.'

[zengargoyle]

richvh wrote:
Since signature images (unlike avatars) are externally hosted, I don't think there's a way to do that.

correct!

Infidel wrote:
I strongly suspect it is by putting a hard limit on the height of the signature field itself. Over there the max height was 100px. It could be text pictures or both, but once it went over 100px it got clipped.

possibly decent idea... i will have to look into the proper CSS junk to do such a thing, and deal with certain brain-dead browsers (*cough* IE) that may not comply with the standard. also, that would not stop the browser from actually downloading the entire image anyway. so it fixed the 'page gets long' problem, but ignores the 'download this giant image and then crop it' problem... in the end, i would rather see the large image a couple of times and then *smack* the user rather then work around the display issues and leave open the opportunity for some fool to put a 'giant download size (MB)' and 'giant display size (XxY)' image in their signature and have nobody notice.

LordOfTheFlies wrote:
You can retrieve all sorts of information from images using php... So it shouldn't be a problem. The question is whether someone wants and/or can do it.

that will not work. since the external image is just a URL string, the actual image could be changed after the first posting. that would require that the TJP server fetch the image and check its size each and every time that URL was displayed in a signature. that would be bad. otherwise, someone could submit a signature image of a small size, then replace that image with a larger image. sorry, querying the image is an untenable solution.

[Infidel]

charizardpal wrote:
Because I remember signing up at a forum, posting a single post and then leaving. (I had become bored with the subject-matter.) A half-year later I returned and rather than responding to what I wrote, a bunch of people were complaining that my signature was too big. Geez, get a life. It's only one post! If I'm not coming back to the forum or posting again then why bother to make such a fuss.

Instead of installing a code to prevent users from uploading large images I'd recomend that if someone has a big avator and posts a few times then you could just PM them to shrink it. tab.'

No, that doesn't work, because of these idiots that come on, make a post or two, and leave. PMing them isn't very useful.