A request from the moderating team regarding signatures

**dlnw** · January 7th, 2006, 05:09 PM

So many of you have taken the time to downsize your signatures. Thank you for being so considerate! I am giving this a bump because there are still several signatures that fill more than my whole screen. The same thing is probably true of others who read the boards. Thanks!

**GillyGals.com** · January 18th, 2006, 05:33 PM

Originally posted by Sail-Away:
Remember that making your signature not have spaces when you do it horizontally will cause people to have to scroll to the right and make the threads to wide.

The best size for signature blocks is an over all 300 X300 pixels. It is neither to large ot to long and most slower dial ups can lod those easily. The more people have larger images(not size) pixel size wise the long load times will take. That includes Avatar images as well.

The maximum allowed size of an avatar is 100 x 100 pixels. Your personal picture will automatically be resized to 100 x 100 pixels. If your picture is not square this will make it look distorted. To remedy this, check the actual proportions your picture on your web hosting site. Photobucket provides this information. To see it, click on the thumbnail of your picture. You will then see a full sized image of your picture. Underneath it you will see something like (800 x 160 - 33K). In this case 800 is the width and 160 is the height in pixels. If the greatest dimension is no larger than 100 pixels, say for example it is 100 x 75, enter 100 the Custom Avatar Width field and 75 in the Custom Avatar Height field. If this is not the case, as with our prior example of 800 x 160, you must do a little math. If we divide both proportions by 8 we get 100 x 20. Alternately you can simply have Photobucket reduce the size of your photo until both the dimensions are less than or equal to 100.

For some of you I hope that information on editing will help. With more editing people will start to notice quicker loading speeds. Remember, you can also change the size of your fonts in your signature to improve smaping as well.

[ December 29, 2005 09:26 PM: Message edited by: Sail-Away ]

Sailaway,
You are very well versed in this.. maybe you can help me... I have a question about loading times.. to me, I would think that that text has nothing much to do with the time that it takes for pages to load as opposed to the Bytes of the images in question. I tend to think that an image of say, 230,000+ bytes or 149,000+ bites would take a considerably longer amount of time to load for someone on dial up, as opposed to a pictures such as mine that contains 65,000 or so bytes? Is there any logic to that thinking??? I may be totally wrong, but I maintain and manage my own web site and bytes take up more space on my site and therefore, I have always been under the impression that the bigger the bytes, the more pixles and there for, a longer loading time??? I do know that due to their sizes, .Midi files (music) and .gif files (animation) take longer to load..

For those who dont know how to read the bytes on an image.. all you have to do is right click on the image.. the info is right there under the 'Properties' option.

When I scroll, I bump the top of my 'wheel' on my mouse.. using the arrow and I can control how fast or slow and can stop the scroll all together. I scroll without having to use my finger to push the wheel.. Melissa, maybe this would save you some pain in your hand cause you wouldn't be working your hand as much? Just a idea... [img]graemlins/thinking.gif[/img]

[ January 18, 2006 02:01 PM: Message edited by: GillyGals ]

Sanguinarius · January 18th, 2006, 07:03 PM

Your right TEXT doesn't have to do with the load time. It has more to do with the amount of space it takes in the thred we all read. The more vertical text, the more space and the more we all have to wade through each thread to read the parts that we want.

The larger part is the image sizes that people are using. Again, some of the images people are using in there signatures have grown to be half a page in size. While I said that the best size for an image in a board is 300X300. For a signature block it would be best if we all could reduce too 100X300. A wider but shorter block.

With editing of the images comes the better load times. GIF choices do take longer. Most members have images and just need to be picky about the sizes and choices they make. It's hard when we all have such wonderful dolls and love to show them all off. Better might be to rotate our images more frequently.

Edited: because I couldn't spell well today.

[ January 18, 2006 03:05 PM: Message edited by: Sail-Away ]

**GillyGals.com** · January 18th, 2006, 07:47 PM

Originally posted by Sail-Away:
Your right TEXT doesn't have to do with the load time. It has more to do with the amount of space it takes in the thred we all read. The more vertical text, the more space and the more we all have to wade through each thread to read the parts that we want.

The larger part is the image sizes that people are using. Again, some of the images people are using in there signatures have grown to be half a page in size. While I said that the best size for an image in a board is 300X300. For a signature block it would be best if we all could reduce too 100X300. A wider but shorter block.

With editing of the images comes the better load times. GIF choices do take longer. Most members have images and just need to be picky about the sizes and choices they make. It's hard when we all have such wonderful dolls and love to show them all off. Better might be to rotate our images more frequently.

Edited: because I couldn't spell well today.

[ January 18, 2006 03:05 PM: Message edited by: Sail-Away ]

I knew that it affected the length of the posts and thus causing people to have to scroll.. but I also saw complaints about loading time for the pages so even if pictures were posted that were long and wide, those pictures are still gonna slow down dial up viewers... seems there is no good way to resolve this, unless the pictures are kept to a certain size allowance.

I am on Road Runner cable modem, so I am not affected by the size of pics and I never gave it a 2nd thought about having to scroll.. I actually LIKE to see people's kids like Starla's daughter and Lauries pics of Diana are always fun cause she always dresses her like the dolls in them. I must admit that the tickers are annoying though and I really dont care when someones birthday is and I am sure they could care less when mine is too. *giggle*

I am not trying to point fingers, and I am not trying to cause problems, I swear I am not, but the moderators are the ones that asked us to make things smaller all the way around in regards to our signatures, yet they have some of the largest pictures on their signatures.. I dont understand this. Tracy told me to shorten my signature line and I have, but even before I changed my image size, my Bytes were at 65,425 on that image and so I deleted my list of dolls I had under my name and resized my picture to to 46,791 bytes so that people who have a slow dial up such as Tracy, help their pages to load a bit faster.. but I see Judi's picture is 149,346 Bytes and Julia's is the largest at 236,477. If the problem about loading time is to be resolved, then pictures that large need to be resized so that people who are on dial up dont have such a long wait, regardless of their monitor settings. Again, I am not trying to stir the pot here... I am offering up help.. I know not everyone knows how to resize pictures or what all this means when we talk about pixels and bytes, so I am more than willing to resize pics for anyone who needs it and might not know how. Just email me.. I can pick up your picture off the net here, resize it and email it back to you in smaller format.
Angie

edited to be more tactful as to not be misinterpreted.

[ January 18, 2006 04:51 PM: Message edited by: GillyGals ]

Thread: A request from the moderating team regarding signatures

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