GameBanshee Forums

Why can't I put an image in my signature?

The GameBanshee Forums database has grown to many GB of data over the last couple of years, and continues to grow at a very fast rate. To keep loading times and data usage to a minimum, I have disabled vB image code and HTML code in signatures. However, you can still add images in a thread.

Picture this. One of our frequent members with 10,000 posts decides to add a 30k image to their signature. Although it doesn't sound like much, that 30k image gets added to every post, which can amount to hundreds of megabytes of data throughput. Now picture 50 of our frequent members doing the same thing =).

Of course, some members may choose to host their own images elsewhere, but I felt that disabling signature images wouldn't cause much grief and would be worth it in the long run.

Not to mention some sig's are big enough, without the pictures

@Buck: What 10k+ posting members

Listen, most of the time the images don't take too long to load. Plus, there could be size limits. I mean, we're allowed to have avatars. Plus, if it's jut Game Banshee web space you're concerned about, you do allow us to attatch files.

Loading an avatar, and loading an image in your sig are two different things. Sig images are often much, much larger then your avatar, and take far more bandwidth to load, and can slow down the page load considerably.

Including images in sigs has been discussed before, some years back, and it was a general consensus that they weren't a necessity.

PLEAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!!!!!!!!!! I've got a really cool one. Come on, you can put limits on size. Please? If you don't, I'll spam this forum under multiple identities. FEAR ME!!!!!! Please?

@Snake-Eater it's Buck's chooice.
And i like it without the pictures, in someother forums i go to theres more signatures then posts.

Also when i visit my parants (in the weekends, and before some big exams) i have a dial up line with my good old 56k modem. It takes some time to load a thread without pictures, i cant even think of the frustration i'm going to have when everyone has a picture in their singature

If you realy want to have us see your signature, place a link to it in your sig

In my opinion, images in signatures make a board look cheap.
Not to mention untidy.

At an another board I had the option of a signature image which was pretty cool, but then I decided that along with my avatar (much bigger than here) it looked a bit busy, so I changed it to just a written sig.

I guess it's just a matter of personal taste though. At the board in question, however, pages can often take a long time to load (and I have a cable connection), so I can certainly see how this would be an issue.

Originally posted by Rob-hin
In my opinion, images in signatures make a board look cheap.
Not to mention untidy.

It's also repetitive, and makes it hard to find messages through all the large images.