Signatures and pictures.

The guideline for signature pictures used on this forum has been: size of a stamp.

This guidline has been added to the help topics a few months ago:

Pictures in sigs are not the occasional used pics to illustrate something, but show up in every topic. It's already possible that one page contains 25 different 4.5 kb avatars. Users with slow modems will experience serious trouble when loading pages with many (larger) graphics.

Nothing has been decided yet about custom avatars, so for now pics in signatures are allowed.

Max size of signature pictures (combined) 150W*100H pixels and 10 kb, no sound.

The pictures used right now, are all very nice ones. But some are very large, both in dimensions and filesize.
This causes some problems:

-Wide pictures enlarge the post and make them 'jump' out of the topic. This makes a messy appearance on small screens or low resolutions.
-Pictures of over 30 kb will take about 5 seconds for a 56k modem user to load. Since one page can contain 25
of such pictures, browsing the forums will become an ordeal.

The guideline in the help topic will be replaced with this new one:

-10 kb max.
-no sound.
-max 500 pixels wide, max 150 pixels high.

Smaller or none at all will be highly appreciated.

This doesn't apply to occasionaly used pictures to illustrate something, though one should keep in mind that 56k modem users should be able to download it within a reasonable time.

Use the LiteSkin if you are very low on bandwidth and need faster browsing, since that Skin will not display signatures, or any other picture except for avatars, at all.
Skins can be selected in Your Control Panel/Account Options.

Thank you for reading.