Frank,
I've PM'd you about signature, and I don't want to beat a dead horse if it is, in fact, dead. but I haven't gotten any answers. Maybe there aren't any
... Signatures.
It seems I've hit a snag Attempting to alter my signature has resulted in me losing most of it. I've saved a copy of my previous signature with all of its links I used to have there in one of my old posts, so can easily get them back, if we find a way to resolve the issue.
I was attempting to add a link to the Pic of the Week Log I've just created. But even if I got rid of everything else and attempt to have only the link:
(135 characters) linked in a very short descriptor - POTW log - I get the the error message:
- Your signature cannot be longer than 150 characters including BB code markup.
There was a time when I had more characters, more links, even an animated gif in my signature.
Could you please look into this? Can we have a higher limit for the signatures? Or is there some other issue that I don't understand? (entirely plausible)
I'll put my reply here vs. PM so others who have the same question, can see the answer. Hopefully it doesn't get too technical. But I am a geek/software engineer/IT specialist so I have a bit of experience here. This could be long. Sorry...
The primary reason for keeping the character count on signatures where it's at is twofold. One is security. The other is size, both when displayed and it's physical code size.
What do I mean? Any link or picture that is displayed on a web page has code behind it. For instance, say that you want to put a clickable image on the page. To you it's just a picture, but it's not just that. There is code behind that picture. As an example, here is a line to display a clickable image. (Note, that this is written in HTML, not BBCode that the forum uses, but they are similar.)
<a href="https://www.example.com"> <img src="https://example.com/image.jpg" alt="Clickable Image" width="200" height="150"> </a>
To you the viewer, you're looking at it saying "It's only a picture and just a little text. It shouldn't eat up much of that 150 character limit." But you would be wrong. This is the code behind the scenes that displays the image on the webpage. When you view it, it looks simple. After all, all it took was a simple click to add the image. But this is what was generated as a result. So you will have eaten up 128 characters of your 150 character limit by just adding that one image. And even simple text links to other webpages act the same way. You can figure that at a minimum the characters it takes to display the link is double what you see, plus a bit more. It takes a lot of characters to make simple things happen on a webpage. So this addresses the physical size and limits. The bottom line is I don't want to eat up significant server resources just to do signatures.
That takes us to the next point, system performance and aesthetics. As you can see from the example above, it takes a lot of characters to make something happen. The more characters, the more disk space it uses and the longer it takes to load a webpage. Say that person has a huge signature with lots of images (which they themselves can be huge) and he has responded 10 times in a 30 post thread. Not taking in account browser optimizations, that's a ton of data that has to be transferred to everyone's PC to display that page. Some people have rocket ship PC's and others have slugs. If you have a slug, you get to hate big, complicated signatures. You may think they are cool but other forum users despise them. And though the forum software gives you the ability to turn off signatures in your user profile, forum users are still taking time to download the data every time a page loads, even if they aren't seeing it. Got a slow internet connection and a slug PC? Then it really sucks.
Which brings us next to aesthetics. Some people treat signatures like everyone needs to see their life story. Sort of like how Facebook was used by people in the early days where they felt that everyone had to know everything that they were doing 24/7. IMO, signatures are meant to relay a short snippet of something relevant to both the person and the environment the person is replying to. Not give your life story. For instance, I don't need to see a picture of someone's 14 cats, in a 1024x768 image in their signature, for every post they make in the GSR. And I'm sure, most other forum users don't either. And again to aesthetics, links to pics and other websites are easily broken, making for an ugly looking page because of broken links and broken links to pictures.
Then we have security. Note that I have been battling hackers and spammers. ever since the inception of this website, but that's another discussion. As I mentioned above, there is code behind everything you see on a webpage. Hackers take advantage of bugs in the system by writing code inside signatures in an attempt to break into the server. And to them this is the holy grail. If they can gain root access to the server through bad coding or bugs, then yehaw! So I do everything in my power to stop them in their tracks. By reducing the amount of code in your signature, we reduce our exposure to hackers.
In my opinion, signatures are meant to convey a simple message about you relative to the environment your replying in. If I were a dictator, I would not allow links and images from being displayed in signatures. I just don't see them as necessary for what we are doing here, but others have a differing opinion, so I allow them.
But I won't be increasing the allowed size of signatures for all the reasons I stated above. From what I can see in your description of your old signature, it was over the top. A bit of text, multiple links, animated gifs? Nah, I'm not a fan of all that. You will need to make the current limits work. Simple text will make the best usage of the 150 character limit. Links and images will eat it up in a heartbeat. Even turning something "bold' has a price - 6 characters. I'm sorry if this wasn't the answer you wanted to hear. But be sure to check out some of the signatures in this thread for some good and bad examples of what I am talking about.
Finally, there is the discussion of why some signatures have a ton of stuff, like you mentioned, and some don't. Especially knowing there is a 150 character limit for signatures. Yes, vBulletin restricted the character count to 150 in the latest update because of all the hackers and spammers that were taking advantage of the big text allowance. It's all a matter of exposure and they wanted to reduce it. So you may see some people with big signatures and broken links etc. and wonder why don't they fix them? I'll go on a limb and say they don't want to edit it because they'll lose what they got knowing there is a 150 character limit if they edit it. But I'll just say now that I don't know how much longer I'll allow that bird to roost. Broken links and broken picture links don't cut it for me. So if one day you notice your signature deleted, you 'll know why. Again, it's both for security and aesthetics, nothing personal. So it's best to do it yourself rather then having me force the issue.
