img limits and code features
 

I would bring this straight to an admin, but unfortunately you gave everyone an animesuki site staff membership so I could only assume Nightwish was the admin as welcome notifications come through that member. However I figured it's safer not to assume, so I posted this here.

I agree with having an img size limit placed on signatures and graphics, I however disagree that it should be as low as it is (50k). Understanding this is a anime discussion board, I wouldn't bring this up as it is understandable, however, having a Graphics Subforum voids this. Solace explained to me why we have limits, but didn't explain why the limit was as low as it was (also understandable as this is an admin's choice of reason). With the current limits, artists in the graphics subforum seem more worried about optimization and file preservation rather than art quality or design. So I will simply ask politely if you could raise the limit to something more realistic for the artists and not just the optimizers.


On another note, why has the show code feature been disabled?

For future reference, if you can't decode it from the tags under the user names or the style, the View Forum Leaders link on the front page leads to the list of who is who.

It is simply to limit the page size. The forum is already heavy weight in terms of page size. Large signature images would only add to that load unnecessarily. The original size was probably arbitrary, but the intention was to ensure images were small enough and suitable even for modem users. Modem users are almost unheard of these days, but keeping things small is still an overarching goal because it helps towards keeping the site quick.

Strictly speaking the fact that this choice impacts on a signature creator's artistic freedom or direction is not directly a concern of the rules. If they choose to create signatures for the forum they follow the rules to the benefit of everyone; the rules don't change to the benefit of the few (i.e. allowing more freedom artistically to a niche) just because they want it...

If you can give specific numbers (how much bigger?) and include in your justification some balance; indicate a benefit for the forum generally?It isn't disabled consciously. I'll have a look to see if there is a setting, but I don't think there is; meaning if the current result isn't the designer's intention this is a bug in the forum software.

Edit: The software does not set the stop_parse property for the [CODE] tag, as it does for some other tags such as [NOPARSE]; don't know if it is deliberate but it is not configurable.

I should have said "the" admin rather than "an" admin, but aside from that

I left out the part about modem users intentionally, but since you've brought them up, I was going to say the disable images and the disable signature feature was created for them and that reason. As for affecting the site's loading time, the graphics are being hosted on seperate servers (in common case, imageshack or photobucket for instance). Thus it is not your site becoming any slower or faster, it is the single page's loading speed being reduced by requesting data from other computers.

As I was saying about the graphics subforum (rather, the Fan Creations subforum to be correct), I don't understand the reason of having one and limiting it. If you were to say, "this isn't a graphics forum, go elsewhere for such a place" then there would be no point in having such a subforum in the first place.

If I had a choice, I would suggest between 70 - 100k. Anywhere in that range seems reasonable to me (90 - 100k being rather large for a limit). Extending the limit widens the color range and uses of depth and focus available in graphics created by users as file compression abides by those details and creates a filesize after preserving them into a file. (If I must, I am ready to prove this with examples) Animations abide by the same rules only they include frames in addition.

If you want a balancing reasoning (not quite as strong, but at least an attempt), your mods wouldn't have to look so hard as to find people breaking the current limit by 8 pixels and 16k, which to many normal users was probably even unnoticeable (probably even to the few modern day modem users). I myself am the example being used here of when I placed an average sig in as this forum's signature.


On the note of the code feature bug, a bug is an admin's responsibility, so I'll leave it up to you guys how you handle it, but I will just add that being unable to use such a feature is rather troublesome when speaking over a form of communication that works better when each user understands how to use that communication.

This isn't true. In a few cases, brought on by artists who desire to push the limits of the file size, the signature limits can be aggravating. However, these same artists are also among some of the most talented people in the community. You'll hear them grumble about the size limits, but you'll never see them lack pride in the artistic quality or design of their works.

Increasing the size would be nice, but outside of the convenience of not worrying about optimizing or using tricks to fake transparencies (which are helpful things to learn anyway), the overall benefit to the forums isn't really there to justify doubling the size, in my opinion.

Frankly, once you get used to the size limit, you hardly even notice it. I often find myself optimizing images even when I don't need to, because I'm so used to checking the size before I save. As for the difference in image quality (and you aren't the first person I've discussed this with btw), yes PNG is superior to Jpeg in image quality. But as I demonstrated using your SOTM entry as an example, there are ways to minimize the difference to the point most people couldn't distinguish them without direct comparison.

As for the /code bit, I was unaware that it was a bug. Code isn't a frequently used tag here, so I assumed it wasn't allowed. I've always used /noparse when posting code. You don't get the fancy window, but it gets the job done.

lol either I picked up an unintentional hint from that post or you must've read a book recently about how to convince people, lol

Well, my complaints have already been made. Even if nothing happens about it I intend to stay here still and just adapt. I just hope the admins will re-consider it.

No, you were correct the first time. I am an administrator, not the administrator (there are four of us).Oh I know that; page load time was exactly what I was referring to.I don't agree that the two are in anyway related :). Having a thriving art community and asking people to keep to strict limits need not be incompatible.Duly noted.You know, the moderators (I love 'em but they are not just mine :heh:) don't actually spend their time looking for signature that violate the rules. Signatures are either obviously outside of the rules and just get noticed or someone points them out.

What I really meant was something that is of tangible benefit to the forum as a whole. What does a regular user, not specifically interested in creating signatures, gain from everyone being allowed to have larger signatures. They're giving up some time and bandwidth for heavier / slower (very slightly) pages; what do they get in return?The feature, as far as I can tell, is doing exactly what the designers intended it to do. The existence of the [NOPARSE] tag reassures me of this point. If all you want to do is post text that doesn't get interpreted as bbcode, [NOPARSE] is the tag to use. [CODE] appears to be designed simply for pre-formatting text (i.e. preserving white-space).

I find the 50K limit on avatars more problematic myself since I don't have a "traditional" (if that's the right word) graphic signature. Even with optimization it's often tough to fit an animated gif into 50K. Usually I find myself reducing the size of the image to accommodate more frames as in this case.

If I were going to increase anything, I'd double the file size for avatars, but leave the image size limit at 100x100.

I've used [code][/code] tags from time to time in the technical support areas. It's indispensable when you want to include monospaced text. I also just embedded the [code] tags in the [noparse] tags so I could display the [code] tags as text.

Erm, avatars don't normally have a disable feature in the control panel and actually would have more affect on the server because many ppl (at least myself) host their avatars on the same server as the forum.

Signatures and avatars work under different circumstances. If a forum was to be avatar based for user output face, then getting rid of the signature feature completly would be more appropriate, however very few forums take such a unique turn.

You're probably reading into it too much. ^^ I have a high speed connection that isn't capped, file sizes don't scare me too much (except when they break my browser because they are super massive megabyte files). If the limit was increased, I wouldn't care, in fact it would be nice for me as an artist to have a little more breathing room. But if they stay the same, I wouldn't care either. I work within the canvas and tools that are given to me.

My comments were directed in a way much better phrased by NightWish:

Depending on the creator of the signature, it could be gold or crap. Kinda like HDTV - it looks pretty, but it doesn't mean the programs automatically improve just because the resolution has.

You can host a signature picture on the forum's server as well.

It's also possible to enable or disable the display of both avatars and signatures via the Options page.

So I don't really see much difference between avatars and signatures in the way they're treated by the vB software or its implementation on AnimeSuki. That's as it should be since they both contribute to the size of the displayed forum page.

Oh, for God's sake again with the image size discussion -.-

Just a question... all of that people that are EVER arguing about image sizes come to this forum for discussing about their favourite anime topics or just for showing their awesome and fashionable avatars/signatures and how cool they are?:heh:

And about image sizes when posting in a thread... if I'm not wrong the regulations are only applied to those threads that are not made on the purpose of showing images so in the image threads you can post as much bigger images as you like so I can't see the real problem.

For the Mother of God! Don't up the limit of avatar and sig pls! It's fine as it is. It's enough already that the img is abused.

Just because most ppl are out of dial-up doesn't mean you should up the size limits. Well... even with dial-up was hard already.

Take the limit as a chalenge to your creativity.

Is there any way for the webpage to automatically resize all images if they are too large, as that I had seen some very high resolution images in some of the wallpaper and screenshot threads.

Not just that it consumes up the bandwidth, it also expands the page or should I put it as that the pictures are bigger than the size of my screen.

Some people tend to love hi-res images even though I really don't see any quality differences except that hi-res images can be resized to any smaller resolution without compromising quality whereas upscaling a smaller resolution would look awful.

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This has nothing to do with the avatar and signature size.

Concerning people in Fan Creation talking a lot about the size limit. Nobody is forcing them to do it in the size limit as long as they dont use them! and I'm also sure given a slightly larger size they would do the same since that's part of the fun when not dealing with 1megapixel+ images.

The [code] feature has/had a highlighting property which auto-colorcoded C, C++, Java etc text, but its purpose is really to hold in a small space large amounts of code. Think about it... you dont want to see a 1000~2000 line post just with computer code in it. :heh:

Oh and... Welcome to animesuki! :p