Signature size - revisited

zoogs

zoogs

New member
We've sort of had this discussion before: Limits on Signatures, Signature Policy ... and while mostly the position has been "no hard and fast rules", there are some excessive ones. Here's an example:

HerbiePostOSUloss.jpg


It just occurred to me today that there is a very simple way we can enforce this: by setting a max-height style rule for images in the signature portion of posts.

We can additionally specify a max-height rule in px or em on the entire signature block itself. Add in overflow:hidden and anything beyond is clipped.

Upsides:Sanity on all signatures. Members retain freedom in designing signatures - they'll just need to tinker with it themselves until it fits. No maintenance on our end.

Downsides: It would introduce hard-and-fast boundaries.

I think we should, and for the sake of cleanliness, we may as well keep it fairly strict: 200-250px for images, 300px or so on the signature itself. Or even, 250px for both. I also would suggest display:none on all youtube/media embeds. No need for that in a signature.

 
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250px img limit, 300px overall to start?

I think 300 is too much personally, but this can give people a measure of wiggle room. Or is this already too constrictive?

 
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When you say 250px img limit, 300px, you're talking height, correct? One image no larger than 250px (pixels, for those not in the know) and overall, max height of a sig, including all images/text/whatever is 300px?

I think that's entirely reasonable. If you can't adequately express yourself in that amount of space, use your "About Me" page. Mine is chock full of images and epoc's video and all kinds of nonsense. You can go nuts there all you want, but for sigs, let's keep it to a dull roar.

While we're talking pixel limits, are we also going to talk about a file size limit, or do we not care? I've been planning on making my sig a .gif for some time now - it'll be the same image, but I'm going to have flash bulbs going off in the crowd. That'll be probably a couple hundred K, depending on the quality I end up with. We cool with larger size files?

Finally - zoogies, what the heck is that dude in your avatar?

 
yep, I mean height. You have it exactly right. The pixel limit is easy to enforce via CSS. The file size limit, I don't think we can really do anything to automate that if we wanted to. Not something worth the trouble probably, so that's fine. On a mostly unrelated note, we could look into cutting the default posts-per-page from 50 down to ... I don't know. 30? 35? That's more of a "will this make the forum more readable" question than a matter of loading time though.

Oh yeah, the dude in my avatar is 'Elevator Guy' from Korean pop artist PSY's absurdly awesome


I have a whole series of these little avatars from that video. I plan on burning through them until I get bored ;)

 
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We can set both height and width restrictions in the Control Panel. I recommend a height of 250 px. For width, I'd recommend no more than 1024 px - and I'd really say more like 900 px. Most folks have resolutions that start at 1024 px - but a lot also have that as their actual resolution. If we exceed 1024, it will cause some members to have to scroll horizontally - a real negative in my opinion.

We can also limit the number of pictures in a signature, as well as the number of URLs and even the number of lines. That way, if someone starts dropping half a dozen pictures and 10 lines of text, we can stop it.

The software USED to allow us to set file size limits. If it still does that, it's hidden in some obsure part of the Control Panel. Personally, I don't see the need. It might affect load time, but in my experince the only load time affected is the actual picture - the rest of the signature, post and thread loads.

I've no preference on the number of posts per page. Whatever everyone wants is fine with me.

 
FYI - The current page has a min-width of 1000px to begin with. Ah, I didn't realize this was a control panel - enforceable setting! The current setting for max width is just 100% of the signature area. I think that should cover it in most cases. I'd have to test to be sure, but I assume that means images in the signature won't be breaking the wrapper and extending pages on their own, that aren't otherwise extended.

If the software allowed for size limits, I am assuming that was for user-uploaded files into their avatar or whatever - and not force external images sourced in signatures. I could be wrong, but as you say, I don't see a huge need for it.

 
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Doesn't the board software scrunch the pics down automatically? Now that I think about this, I'm almost positive my sig is reduced by the board.

Here's my sig pic:

skin_fetch.jpg


It's 1600 x 175px, but on my About Me page, when I check the image info, it says it's scaled to 1261 x 138px. Curiously, on IE, it says the image is 1554 x 170px - again, probably scaled down.

Is there some way we could allow people to use whatever pic they want, but scale it down to acceptable limits?

 
That's looking like the max-width: 100% at work.

The non-header/branding area of the default QB Live skin as a max-width of 960px, so it will never get less than that regardless of window size. Give or take a few pixels and percentage points, the width of your signature image will never exceed the width of its container because signature images have a max-width: 100% setting. If the width of the image is scaled down, the browser will automatically scale down the height to maintain aspect ratio.

So these settings, as far as I know, are all about letting users use whatever image they like, but forcibly re-sizing the display of it. If there's an admin panel setting, all it does is (probably) change the CSS.

 
I have a 22" monitor at work and a 19" monitor at home, and there's no scrolling with the difference in ratio, so I figured that was it.

So have we made the decision to limit sizes? Max 250? Max 300? Overall max...?

 
AR, I can't make heads or tails of the "Forum Setting" for image restriction. It looks like it's meant for posts, not just the signature section - and while it says you can set width and height restrictions, there's only one box to enter a setting.

So given the discussion so far in the thread, I'm going to just add it to the stylesheet in QB Live, at the end of z_custom.css. I'll go with img-250px and overall height - 300px. My guess is most people are not going to notice this, unless they run into the 300px clip limit via text.

By the way, by 'aspect ratio' I just mean the height/width ratio is automatically preserved.

 
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