Signatures - limits & guidance

[Mike]

Signatures fill up the space at the end of your posts, and can be used to tell people a little about you, your sense of humour, or what Group Builds you're participating in. Some people don't bother, some people put something in there and never change it, and some people change theirs all the time... it's like another little hobby to them The problems arise when the signatures get too big. That's either too many pics, pics stacked on top of eachother, long lists of what you're building/would like to build/are thinking of building/have built, or a combination of all the above. That makes for longer pages, and folks have to scroll further to get to each post - the nuggets of information that are supposed to be the prime focus of this forum. These are the regulations.

• If you have one or more picture with no text, it/they can be a maximum of 150 pixels tall by 400 wide in total.
• If you have text and pictures, the pictures can be 100 pixels tall, and the text must use up minimum additional space.
• If you want multiple pictures, you'll need to stitch and shrink them down so that they fit within the 150 x 400 space mentioned above.
• If you just have text in your signature, keep it to the height of 4 lines of ordinary unformatted forum text.
• If you have a list, make it into a comma separated list, rather than a new line for each kit you're building.
• Every picture in your signature slows down the loading of the page that you post in, and eats up your PhotoBucket (or wherever else) bandwidth. Keep the pics small, optimise them for quick loading (small file size), and everyone benefits.

Please try and follow them, as eventually we'll just delete those that are clearly taking advantage. As mentioned above, make your lists go sideways, don't leave loads of spaces between the bits of your signature, and respect everyone else's mouse scroll wheel finger. Also, remember that some people don't have massive screens, so these things take up a lot of screen real estate, and can hang off the edge of their screen, forcing them to scroll left and right to read the posts. That's really annoying.

4 lines of unformatted text
4 lines of unformatted text
4 lines of unformatted text
4 lines of unformatted text

A word to the signature averse
If you hate signatures that much, you can turn them off by going into My Controls > Options > Board Settings and set Do you wish to view members signatures when reading topics? to NO.


A final word to the unreasonable and the indignant
Yes, I know - we're all nazis for wanting you to keep your signatures to a reasonable size and we're crushing your creative impulses, but please abide by the regs so we don't have to come round and beat you with rubber pipe

[Mike]

We're getting a few complaints about the size of people's signatures, so I'm bumping this up to remind you all that there are limits, and you need to stick to them, or your signature will be taken down. The reasoning is already stated in the original post, so have a read