Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Signature Policy Updated
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 03:50 PM
I never thought I'd have to do this, but lately I've been going "sig crazy" because it seems some sigs are a little out of control. It's funny, because in comparison to many other sites ours sigs are very tame. When I was at Mobius I was looking at my pal Howard Chui's forums, and some of the sigs had graphics bigger than the banners on this site! 8O Still, lately I've been a irked at how long the sigs have become - people seem to try to cram their entire PDA life story into their sigs, but that's not really the point of them. phpBB supports profiles, which are quite under-utilized on this board. Profiles are a place where you can include all sorts of information about yourself, your interests, and your PDA history - but it's contained in a place where people don't have to see it every single time you post a message. :wink: You can update your profile by going into your preferences.
So here's what we're changing: effective immediately, sigs are not shown on the mobile version of the site. I've been browsing the site using my Smartphone a lot lately, and sigs = more scrolling, so away they go. Again, I'd encourage people to use their profile and put their info in there, because we've created a mobile-friendly template for the profile page (you need to be a subscriber to see it though). Unfortunately, phpBB isn't smart enough to limit the number of lines on a sig, only the total characters. I just saw a sig that was NINE LINES LONG 8O, yet still under 500 characters. People, sigs are not the location for your entire resume. :wink: We're going to try and hack the code to see if we can restrict it to three lines worth, but in the meantime the limit is going from 500 characters down to 200 characters. Remember you can use HTML, so you can include a link to your Web site very easily without using up 25 characters putting in the full URL. Just say "Come visit my Web site".
Graphics are a thorny issue. I like graphics, and I know people enjoy being creative with graphics. But the problem is that 75% of the graphical sigs I've seen used on this board throughout it's history have either been too flash, too wide, too big in KB, or troublesome in some other way. So, in light of this, we're implementing a phpBB hack that will only allow 88 x 31 sized images to be used. These are standard-sized Web buttons are that small and unobtrusive, yet you can still do fun things with them. Just look at all of these! :-)
Comments welcome, but I hope I've explained my reasoning behind these changes and that most of you will agree this will make things in the forums run a little smoother. I've always preferred to have a relaxed attitude about sigs, but in the past few months I've lost count the number of times I've had to send a PM to someone asking them politely if they'd change their sig - so now we're just going to limit what can be done instead, and we won't have to send those messages. ;-)
So here's what we're changing: effective immediately, sigs are not shown on the mobile version of the site. I've been browsing the site using my Smartphone a lot lately, and sigs = more scrolling, so away they go. Again, I'd encourage people to use their profile and put their info in there, because we've created a mobile-friendly template for the profile page (you need to be a subscriber to see it though). Unfortunately, phpBB isn't smart enough to limit the number of lines on a sig, only the total characters. I just saw a sig that was NINE LINES LONG 8O, yet still under 500 characters. People, sigs are not the location for your entire resume. :wink: We're going to try and hack the code to see if we can restrict it to three lines worth, but in the meantime the limit is going from 500 characters down to 200 characters. Remember you can use HTML, so you can include a link to your Web site very easily without using up 25 characters putting in the full URL. Just say "Come visit my Web site".
Graphics are a thorny issue. I like graphics, and I know people enjoy being creative with graphics. But the problem is that 75% of the graphical sigs I've seen used on this board throughout it's history have either been too flash, too wide, too big in KB, or troublesome in some other way. So, in light of this, we're implementing a phpBB hack that will only allow 88 x 31 sized images to be used. These are standard-sized Web buttons are that small and unobtrusive, yet you can still do fun things with them. Just look at all of these! :-)
Comments welcome, but I hope I've explained my reasoning behind these changes and that most of you will agree this will make things in the forums run a little smoother. I've always preferred to have a relaxed attitude about sigs, but in the past few months I've lost count the number of times I've had to send a PM to someone asking them politely if they'd change their sig - so now we're just going to limit what can be done instead, and we won't have to send those messages. ;-)
