Sig Rules Clarification

[VSS]

Thats not nessciarly true See this pic. See this pic where I can still be semi-reminded of my infractions.

Spoiler:

Also unless you use the "Remember Me" feature when logging in every time you visit GW a person would have to close that window.

The bar doesn't bother me.
So far, it has stayed closed and I've logged in and out a few times this morning.

[pip2]

hi
just a small question.
why is the limit 50kb?
and would there be any chance of increasing it?? as we've just increased avatar size?
i dabble in sig making so i'm not making anything amazing and yet still some of mine can go up to 100kb.

[amconway]

hi
just a small question.
why is the limit 50kb?
and would there be any chance of increasing it?? as we've just increased avatar size?
i dabble in sig making so i'm not making anything amazing and yet still some of mine can go up to 100kb.

You should be able to bring it in under 50. Mine is 48.9. Are you saving as a JPEG? make sure the quality isn't set to high, and make sure you aren't saving the layers, if you're working in photoshop.
Tell me what you're doing and maybe I can help, or post it somewhere I can download it, and I'll see what I can do...

[jelgate]

hi
just a small question.
why is the limit 50kb?
and would there be any chance of increasing it?? as we've just increased avatar size?
i dabble in sig making so i'm not making anything amazing and yet still some of mine can go up to 100kb.

Because not everyone who visits GW are on high speed Internet. And those 100 KB sigs take it longer for them to load the pages. Avatars are so small it doesn't have that much effect of forum loading when compared to sigs.

[Falcon Horus]

Are you saving as a JPEG? make sure the quality isn't set to high, and make sure you aren't saving the layers, if you're working in photoshop.

Layers aren't saved in .jpg. Saving it as .gif will take the size down, and the quality.

But one can check how much kb it'll be when you're saving it - when you have to set the quality in the next window popping up after the save as-window, at the bottom of it, the kb change according to the level one sets it.

And don't forget to set it 72 pixels - that's more than enough if you just want web-quality. (random info: professional print -> 300 pixels minimum )

[amconway]

Layers aren't saved in .jpg. Saving it as .gif will take the size down, and the quality.

Photoshop can save layer data in JPEGs if you don't have it set up right. It shouldn't happen, but it can. Oh wait, I'm thinking about tiffs, aren't I?

Good point on the number of pixels per inch. I should have mentioned that, although I'd be surprised if that's the problem. Most screencaps are at 72 already, although I screwed myself up when forgetting to check when making an illustration and realizing too late that it was at 92. *sigh*

[TameFarrar]

Just a friendly reminder
while we definitely appreciate folks reporting the signatures that they see that are out of specs...please do not email any of the people that you may personally report and harass them or snark at them. This defeats the purpose of friendly fixing

I am not saying anyone here is or has done that but we do have one member that is stating that they have received a *haha got you* email after we received a report on their signature. While the signature was in fact out of specs... it is not a tool to *get anyone* since we don't *infract* anyone or hold signatures against folks


the only time we would do that is if the person who has the out of spec sig refuses to change it or refuses to come into compliance with the guidelines we have have set since this Forum opened for business

So just so everyone knows...the Signature *infractions* are NOT held against you for any reason with the exception of the above.

[Skydiver]

why do we have the size limit?

let's say you have your view set to 20 posts per page and every one of those people have 100K sigs,, all of a sudden that's 2000K, or 2 megs that has to download

and that's presuming that the rest of the page has no pictures and is nothing but text

for those not on high speed (which is a lot of our members) big sigs lierally slows the forum down to a crawl

Darren keeps an eye on how people access the forum, and, i'm sure, should hte day come that he can see that a significant portion of our members are on high speed or better, he may wish to alter the rules.

That being said, at the end of the day, a sig is to be nothing more than a brief customization for each poster, not a long and unwieldy dissertation

[Jper]

hi
just a small question.
why is the limit 50kb?
and would there be any chance of increasing it?? as we've just increased avatar size?
i dabble in sig making so i'm not making anything amazing and yet still some of mine can go up to 100kb.

Hi, well first of all, you should be able to get most of the sigs, even the 200-700pix ones under the 50kb limit. I would recommend trying Irfanview. It’s a free, easy and simple program and it allows you to downsize a pic (Irfanview is compatible with a huge bunch of formats) without losing too much quality. Mostly if a pic is over the 50kb-limit this is because it has been saved wrong. For example, if it is 100dpi instead of 72dpi, or it has all this extra information with it, or the jpeg-compression settings are on the maximum or… etc. You can then easily reduce the size five times without losing distinguishable quality.

As to why there’s a 50kb-limit, well, I noticed lately GateWorld is taking up one Gigabyte, more or less, in my bandwidth-usage per month. That’s a lot for a simple forum. Mostly this is because of the sigs and more particularly those on clintonio and other sig-rotating-services. Why? Well, because sig-pictures on Clintonio are not cached. So they are refreshed and reloaded and re-downloaded everytime with a new page. Which means if you have a 200kb-sig-picture and I come across of it five times, that makes one megabyte! This happens 900 times a month, which makes 900MB, but if you reduce this to within the limits, this would only be 225MB, which gains me a 700MB extra bandwidth per month. Which is important as I often use a university-internet-connection, which only allows me 4 gigabytes per month.

And then I’m not counting the pics that aren’t sigs on the pages… However, I’m not perfectly able to figure it out due to the overlap in places the sig-pic and general pic are stored, but it almost seems now as if those pics are consuming a lot less bandwidth than the sig-pictures which are rotating…

Anyway, even a 200MB reduction of bandwidth-usage is always welcome.

Because not everyone who visits GW are on high speed Internet. And those 100 KB sigs take it longer for them to load the pages. Avatars are so small it doesn't have that much effect of forum loading when compared to sigs.

And yes yet another thing is that those sigs indeed increase the load-time of a page. In particular: As the images on the sig-rotation-services are not cached and reloaded, they take much longer than the other sigs to load, especially when they are mostly outside of the GW-sig-limits.

Also I want to point out 90% of the members seem to have no problems with this… and have a sig that is well within the limits. So at the end of the day it isn’t that bad.

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With the layers thing. There’s an option within PhotoShop to preserve the layers within a JPEG. It works, but only with PhotoShop and certain settings. However this indeed increases the size of the jpeg so much it’s highly unlikely someone would not notice it. (As it goes up to one megabyte.)

However a thing with PhotoShop, at least in the older versions, was that saving as a jpeg without merging all of your layers could significantly increase your file size, even though PS would flatten them for you. I took the habit as to always flatten all the layers to one, before saving. (So I don’t know about the new versions.)

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[Falcon Horus]

Photoshop can save layer data in JPEGs if you don't have it set up right. It shouldn't happen, but it can. Oh wait, I'm thinking about tiffs, aren't I?

I have yet to see an option where I can keep the layers in a jpg, besides why would I want layers in it anyway? *shrug*

Layers are preserved in a .tiff, but it's one of those file-types that allow you to still change something afterwards, while that's not possible with a jpg.

[amconway]

I have yet to see an option where I can keep the layers in a jpg, besides why would I want layers in it anyway? *shrug*

Layers are preserved in a .tiff, but it's one of those file-types that allow you to still change something afterwards, while that's not possible with a jpg.

That would be why I said I was wrong.

[Falcon Horus]

That would be why I said I was wrong.

Hey, there could be a way... but we haven't found it yet. You won't hear me say I know photoshop like the back of my hand - maybe like the palm of my hand but there's always something new to discover...even for me.

[VSS]

I have a question-

If I post a picture, the limit is 75k.

So I can take a sig or banner and if I'm just posting it once, it's all right to be over the sig limit of 50k?

[TameFarrar]

I have a question-

If I post a picture, the limit is 75k.

So I can take a sig or banner and if I'm just posting it once, it's all right to be over the sig limit of 50k?

any type of picture or banner you are *posting* is subject to our picture rules, not our signature rules

[VSS]

any type of picture or banner you are *posting* is subject to our picture rules, not our signature rules

So, for clarification, I just have to keep it under 75k, and within the forum boundaries.