As a humble graphic designer who enjoys making his own content and displaying it on the internets, I work hard to create things I really think look nice. So one can understand my frustration when save these pictures in a highly reputable PNG format, only to be unable to use them due to file size limitations. Inferior image formats are bad. This is 2012. GIF and JPEG should never be used ever.

link to prevent silly argument

I SAYS WE BOOST SEN PICTAR SIZE FILE CAP. (Plz)

200 kB limit on signature images.
30 kB limit on avatar images.

Alternatively, we could put a lower limit, but unlock these once obtaining regular status.

MOAR BITS PLEASE. FOR EVERYONE. (agreeing with me may or may not come with kitten basket gratuity)

Please consider that there are still slow internet connections existing.
For example, at my parent's house I've only 46kb/s downstream. So if I see a page with 2mb of data, it takes a little bit longer to fully load because of signatures. That connection is still considered broadband and there are a lot of households with worse Internet globally.

Also, I hate websites that use 10 billion pictures and flash animations on their site just to try to make it look better.

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200 kB limit on signature images.

That's more or less an unenforced rule, AFAIK. Regardless, that's still only double.

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30 kB limit on avatar images.

+50% of default level? You can get that with 500 or less minerals. That's a bit of contribootin' or game whoring.

Essentially, if you're asking for an increase, make it a noticeable one.

Those numbers were okay, actually.

The problem is that the difference between 20 kB and 30 kB is only 33%, but rarely can you get a PNG 125x125 picture of any practical use to below 20 kB. Usually they fall between 20-30 kB range-- including completely optimized. So that 50% increase is actually quite substantial.

@Ahli: See, browsers have this thing called a cache...

Last I checked, this site is a community of a game made in 1998. I don't think we should make it become something that demands significantly more resources to be usable than the game it represents. And like Ahli has mentioned, there are still a large amount of people with not-so-great internet speeds, which is the reason for the size limitations in the first place.

It's funny that you suggest that you can "unlock" more space by becoming a significant contributor here; we already have that system in place.

See, it represents sc2 as well.

And a large amount, really? They're few and far between, to be sure.

Let's take a step back and be realistic. We support SC2, but we currently are not the only go-to place for the SC2 scene, and our traffic is not primarily of SC2 players. On the other hand, SEN is definitely the place for anything SC1.

Do you have numbers to back that up? Because I have some on my side:

http://www.splatf.com/2011/11/aol-dialup-charts/ - 3.5 Million still use dial-up from AOL (Nov 2011)
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/012411-us-internet-users-broadband.html - only 1/3 of the U.S. has a fast broadband connection (Jan 2011)

If that's the game this site represents, then perhaps all the forums related to said game shouldn't be hidden by default.

1. New accounts created should have the Show All Forums thing checked by default in their settings.
2. A query should be run for all users that have been created in the last 6 months, or not active in the last 6 months, that sets this to true for them.

This gets the recent noobies as well as the old members coming back (quite a few over the xmas period, not so many now) and are like "where did all the SC1 forums go?".

I had my sig removed by Moose once for being too large; when uploading your own signature image, the only way to get around the 400x150 auto-resize thing, the 100KB limit is strictly enforced.

Regardless, signature images should have a higher filesize cap. While I acknowledge that fancy photoshopped signature images are becoming more and more scarce in modern times, it's no excuse to discriminate against them by making it impractical to have a large non-text signature.

You say you're a graphic designer, but all I see is a fixed width font and a stock arrow.

Corbo's the person who had this implemented if I recall correctly. He told me privately it was part of his plan to make SEN die, as we'd get no more SC1 traffic and get very little SC2 traffic. I don't know how true this is; however, I believe I told people in the staff forum or told DevliN privately and nothing was changed, which was frustrating.

Ever hear the expression, "less is more"? There are some things I would genuinely change about it, but I didn't really feel like putting too much effort into it. Also, the entire image is a vector, and that's not actually an arrow, it's three lines and a triangle.

/vectorisawesome

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In any case, the idea we came up in the SB:

Create a 56k skin that's extremely minimalist. Have options to turn off signatures or avatars. Make it accessible by asking people in registration. That way people with bad connections can view the forums just fine without having to wait a long time (even with current file caps, dial-up users will have trouble loading pages for the first time). We can then upgrade the forums and user image file sizes without fear of ruining anything.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 9 2012, 8:23 pm by Sacrieur.

Quote from Aristocrat

Quote from poison_us

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200 kB limit on signature images.

That's more or less an unenforced rule, AFAIK.

I had my sig removed by Moose once for being too large; when uploading your own signature image, the only way to get around the 400x150 auto-resize thing, the 100KB limit is strictly enforced.

Oh, because you can't upload multiple images to a third party host and arrange them correctly?

What about people who are just visiting the site and have dial-up? We can't default it to 56k for guests, but no dial up users could look at the site to see if they want to register.

It wouldn't be the default theme.



It's 100 kB limit on off-site hosted images as well.

Did you even read what I posted?

Let me rewrite it for you.

1. Dial up users cannot load the non-56k version as it will be too big.
2. The default version will be the big version.
3. In order to really know you want to register you must load the site.

Therefore, a dialup user will not be able to register.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 9 2012, 2:10 pm by TiKels.

If you recall, that is exactly what I did with a few of my previous signatures

Having to cut a single image into multiples is completely unacceptable in 2012.

I believe I answered the concern. It won't be the default theme.

For obvious reasons, the default theme won't take centuries to load; but we should not hold back on dial-up's account.

If I remember correctly, signature images load last. I had awful connection back in the days, the forum and posts and everything loaded first, I could read everything before all the sigs loaded up, didn't bother me.