[FairWeatherFan]

I like reading people's signatures but I noticed that some posters have massive images in their signatures. I noticed that one poster in general messages recently had a seven meg .gif file in their signature. Should this be allowed? I don't like to complain but it is a drain on bandwith and slows down the speed of thread browsing.

[Snoo Foo]

you can turn signatures off, I have them turned off.

[FairWeatherFan]

Thanks for you reply. I know they can be turned off but I quite enjoy reading some...
Find it weird that the no. of lines a signature can be is limited...so as to make thread reading easy...and yet it is okay to put some ridiculously hugely sized image in one?

[Carlita]

You shouldnt have to switch signatures off The premium members can find a thread in the premium forum about the limits of signature pics. (600 x 225 pixels) If you see one that's bigger, please report a post and tell us about it, we can't check/see everyone's signature Also if you find a gif that's slowing things down too much, please report so we can look into it.

[TankingTheSet]

Originally Posted by ~*Carlita*~

You shouldnt have to switch signatures off The premium members can find a thread in the premium forum about the limits of signature pics. (600 x 225 pixels) If you see one that's bigger, please report a post and tell us about it, we can't check/see everyone's signature Also if you find a gif that's slowing things down too much, please report so we can look into it.

The problem could be that the forum server only checks the resolution of the animated GIF.

So the servers checks the limit of 600 x 225 limiting the file-size to 20k or something. But it doesn't check for animated gifs. So if the gif has 1000 frames with 600 x 225 size that's 20MB!!! Clearly a loophole there.

After the picture is loaded once on most desktop systems it will resolve because it stored in the temporary internet files although it still slows down slower PCs because of the huge size.

However, if the PC or mobile device has a medium/slow net connection there will be huge delay the first time the page loads, or every time if the device doesn't have large internet cache (temporary internet files) or isn't properly configured.

Apart from the problems for users this may also kill server performance. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent problems with the MTF server is related to this loophole. I mean repeatedly having to send 20000k instead of 200k to load a forum page is some difference for a server!

[Carlita]

Good point. I shall pass it on to the webmaster. See if they can set a limit like the avatars. ...x... pixels or ...kb whichever is smaller, something like that.

[SloKid]

Originally Posted by TankingTheSet

The problem could be that the forum server only checks the resolution of the animated GIF.

Unfortunately I don't believe there's any check now and the images can be any size in theory. There are guidelines on size, but that's it.

But as Carlita said, the idea will be forwarded on.

[TankingTheSet]

A small correction, in most cases I think a big animated gif will be linked from an external website, so it doesn't affect the MTF servers itself in that case.