A reminder about signatures

[p1ngpong]

Lately we have been getting tons of people who have absolutely massive images as their sigs. It seems many people are unaware that we do have rules regarding how large an image you are allowed to have as a signature.

Signatures should not be larger than 500 x 150 pixels in dimension.

And they should not be larger than 80kb in size.

If your sig breaks either of these size restrictions please do the staff a favor and change it so that we don't have to remove it for you.

As always if you are unsure about anything please refer to our forum rules which can be found here http://gbatemp.net/help/terms or PM a member of staff.

 

[broitsak]

Mine good?

 

[Black-Ice]

Mine good?

I made yours the same size as mine. The size i've used since i signed up.
416x144
Just under the limits.

 

[Xenirina]

Loving this thread.
Most of the people have signatures.

 

[Rydian]

I made yours the same size as mine. The size i've used since i signed up.
416x144
Just under the limits.

Well it's under the dimensional limit, but over the filesize limit. Try 8-bit PNG.

 

[Black-Ice]

Well it's under the dimensional limit, but over the filesize limit. Try 8-bit PNG.

Swear? *sigh*
where are all these measurements.

 

[Rydian]

Save a copy and check the filesize, it's over 100KB. If, when saving it in your image editor, you tell it to use 8-bit PNGs (or PNGs without an alpha layer, or whatever) it should be smaller. If that's not an option and it only makes one kind of PNG, tell it GIF (8-bit color as well).

 

[Arras]

The funny thing is everyone on this page except Rydian (and me, I have no sig) is over the filesize limit.

 

[Deleted member 318366]

Loving this thread.
Most of the people have signatures.

Your sig is the best been waiting to compliment on it for some time now, i love zelda!

 

[pyromaniac123]

Avatar and sig combined only 80kb? Why the such paltry amount?

 

[pwsincd]

That depends on what you mean, because there's three ways to go about it.

1 - Use CSS to limit a user's signature to the specific dimensions.
This makes sure that a user's sig will never stretch the page, but does nothing against large-filesize sigs and doesn't actually stop users from putting them in. This is the least bandwidth-intensive, so it's the most common.

2 - Use cURL or something else when the user changes their sig to grab the headers of any image and make sure it's below a certain filesize and dimensions. This is bandwidth and CPU-intensive per-change, and users can bypass it by simply uploading a different file to the same URL.

3 - Use cURL or something else to check sig images on every load. This stops users from bypassing the limits by changing the file at a specific URL, but is way too bandwidth and CPU intensive for anybody to even consider using.

Well the technical specifics aside, the admin can choose the file size limit in kB and/or choose the image dimensions. Now how this is done in php im not wholy sure but i am fully aware it can be done even with free nuke sites and their deriviatives it is possible out of the box , now reading the xonoforo forums it seems currently it isnt and there is a little development from one of the add on devs to allow some siggy control and the suggestions i have made are in review to be added to his WIP . As for your suggestions 2 and 3 simply not allowing URL images stops this , and instead allowing users up upload the image in question and therefore controlling the image size in kB . Of course it is nice to have the feature of URL images and im sure that can be controlled also , i just dont know enough technically to script the feature , but im well aware from adding pre written scripts to other forums that it is easily possible.

 

[BORTZ]

I still like the old 100X400 limit back from V3.

 

[pwsincd]

The script could always force a resize if it exceeds parameters , ugly i know but possibly forcing a user to alter it .

 

[Rydian]

Well the technical specifics aside, the admin can choose the file size limit in kB and/or choose the image dimensions. Now how this is done in php im not wholy sure but i am fully aware it can be done even with free nuke sites and their deriviatives it is possible out of the box , now reading the xonoforo forums it seems currently it isnt and there is a little development from one of the add on devs to allow some siggy control and the suggestions i have made are in review to be added to his WIP . As for your suggestions 2 and 3 simply not allowing URL images stops this , and instead allowing users up upload the image in question and therefore controlling the image size in kB . Of course it is nice to have the feature of URL images and im sure that can be controlled also , i just dont know enough technically to script the feature , but im well aware from adding pre written scripts to other forums that it is easily possible.

Having the images uploaded to the site would stop the users from bypassing restrictions, but would also stop users from using dynamic sigs like those wii game cards, steam cards, etc...

Also it'd be even more bandwidth-intensive than checking the stats of the images each time, since the forum's feeding/hosting them...

 

[Rydian]

The script could always force a resize if it exceeds parameters , ugly i know but possibly forcing a user to alter it .

A visual resize would still have the whole filesize issue, and if it's resizing the actual image then that'd be even MORE CPU intensive as the server would need to resize them.

The cheapest thing to do (by far) is simply have the server NOT do anything to the images themselves.

 

[pwsincd]

it has to be quicker to host them than to out source them .


http://php.net/manual/en/function.getimagesize.php

A relatively simple procedure to check images comply.

 

[Rydian]

it has to be quicker to host them than to out source them .

No, why would it be.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.getimagesize.php

A relatively simple procedure to check images comply.

That relies on being able to access the image, meaning it either must already exist on the server (and thus the site is hosting it, paying for the bandwidth and space), or the script needs to download the image to the server in order to check it. A download for a server is no problem, but if it needs to download and check every sig image every time, it'll easily become an unreasonable burden.

I wrote a signature checking script for another forum... I'll even give you the source if you want, since I had to use cURL to follow redirects and other stuff people would try to pull to fool checks.

 

[pwsincd]

Yeah i get your whole streamlining issue , i was trying to suggest the obvious control measure rather than just banging a drum and hoping ppl will listen.

Maybe then seperate the download and checking procedure. Use something like fopen to read the image info a bit at a time , dumping info to a temporary file , monitoring how much you have read , and once you cross a predetermined filesize limit and havent yet stopped reading , simply dump that image as non compliant , having also read the file dimesions for those parameters . Either way its not beyond doing to force simple rules upon users. God forbid you dont want p1ngp0ng checking every siggy for compliance

 

[Snailface]

Mine good?

snip

snip

snip

snip

I attached a fixed jpeg for all your sigs. It was as simple as re-saving in msPaint. You guys avatar's are fine (6K) so you're all now under 80K.

 

[Minox]

I attached a fixed jpeg for all your sigs. It was as simple as re-saving in msPaint. You guys avatar's are fine (6K) so you're all now under 80K.

I hope that you're aware that you've introduced quite a lot of JPEG artifacts as well as somewhat washed out colors into these "fixed" signatures.

JPEG is a lossy image format. Every time you re-save something it loses quality and it is therefore recommended to work with files that have been re-saved as little as possible.

 

[Rydian]

Well to be more nitpicky JPEG artifacting at 80%+ is not visible without close inspection to most people, modern paint doesn't save at 50% quality anymore (thank god), and the quality only lessens when it's recompressed again, which uploading and downloading repeatedly shouldn't do (only if it passes through an image editor of some sort).