New Signature Bylaws

[Saint]

Alright, to the hosts I handed out a rough sketch of a signature rule that would be put up. Well, here it is...

After talking it over with admins from other boards that I'm in contact with, a compromise of sorts.

The maximum height will be 250 pixels by the max length of 600 pixels. Even though, if you have a signature this height, let's keep it to one image.

To accommodate this, there will be restrictions. Only two links offsite are allowed for the sake of the placeholders of your images. Being, for example, how some folks are using Pepsi's pictures for signatures. That is acceptable, since it is hosted from photobucket. Which means, no signature images are allowed to be uploaded onto our server. And considering how avatars did not transfer over, we agreed it would be safer for your images this way.

Another matter that has come up, is advertisement links for outside sims in signatures. I would like to bring everyone's attention to . Article IV, Section 5 states, "No member may use SLA resources to recruit for or advertise an outside simulation or organization. " However, Article IV, Section 5, Subsection i states, "The sole exception to the above provision is any media designated by the SLA for such recruiting or advertising."

We do have that exception listed within the guidelines of the Recruitment forum. Which states, if you are a member in good standing with the SLA and are a regular poster on these boards, you can advertise for your sims there. And that is the only place allowed for outside sims. However, for a rule of thumb, your outside sim can be listed as your homepage via your User Control Panel. That is the only secondary exemption allowed. However, no part of your signature will be allowed to point to that homepage link under your member avatar. It will be up to the user to click your link under your user avatar on their own free will.

And as such, the character amounts will be restricted to 500 characters of type, to help the strain of data on the board. As such, the board will enact this on Saturday, October 24th, at 11am Eastern Time.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter, as we hope to provide a better board experience for all.

- The SLA Ten Forward Staff

[Bjorn Dragoon]

[Saint]

Oh, thanks Jade...

500 is spaces and bbCode, and let's correct that to the 25th. Which is a bit of a balance, because most boards have cut down to 255.

[Warp]

Long signatures and image-heavy signatures produce a couple of problems. The biggest is probably readability -- some people have signatures that are visually larger than a paragraph-long post! Processing time is number two (rendering large, complex signatures over and over again requires more processing for our server, and pulling in images, especially from non-SLA servers, really slows down load time for threads).

500 characters and a 600x250 image size limit seems like a good tradeoff between allowing creative signatures and avoiding problems for people using the boards. We are here to read posts, after all, not to wait for large signatures to load and try to pick out post content between images.

As a side note, and this is a request more than a rule: for readability's sake, please try to limit your signatures (images included) to the equivalent of six single-spaced lines in length at the default font size. If signatures are larger than the average short post, it gets really hard to differentiate the posts from the signatures.

Thanks folks!

[Saint]

Today is the day, all signatures are down to 500 characters, links are turned off, and everyone with more than two pictures, please pick the picture(s) you want to keep. Because over the weekend, admins will be checking up on this.

[Tavey]

Haven't been any issues in the years since it was implemented. Just saying.