I notice that some forum pages can be quite slow to load (even though I have broadband, though not very fast broadband), and checking some sigs I see the 100KB rule is routinely ignored, many people have 200KB sigs and some even 400-500KB!
People probably think that hiding part of their sig behind a spoiler tag saves bandwidth but it doesn't, it only saves visible space, all the pics are fetched anyway even if they're not displayed onscreen.
Do people think sig rules should be enforced? It is not a big problem for me and of course you can turn sigs off in your forum settings if it's a problem* (e.g. for dial-up users), but the rule is there so maybe we should discuss it.
*Incidentally unlike use of spoiler tags, turning sigs off in your control panel forum settings really does stop images being fetched - I just checked. On a typical forum page an extra 700KB of images were downloaded when i turned sigs back on! (This takes about 8 secs on my connection)
Tips on making smaller images
Photoshop is very bad for making bandwidth-friendly images since it adds much junk to them. Most photoshop jpegs can be shrunk by 10-30KB by running them through a lossless optimiser (such as the Irfanview one) to remove all the junk in the file header. Often even people's avatars are 30-40KB but after zapping the junk you may find the real image is only 5KB, the rest is just header data! Also setting the quality level a little lower can do wonders, try looking for a sweet spot where the size drops without the visual quality suffering. My current sig for instance (Tomo-chan) is only 19KB despite being 5 frames animated gif. (It took a lot of work though! I made it for a website where I had strict daily bandwidth limit and needed to keep each page c/w images under 50KB because of high volume of visitors.)
A lot of people are using PNG format - if you use JPEG instead it is typically 1/5 the size and indistinguishable unless someone looks closely at 200% magnification. I don't think I have seen any 200KB sig images that couldn't have been shrunk to 50KB with no noticeable effects. If using PNG or GIF because of need for transparency, try reducing colour depth, e.g. in images the size of a sig 256 colour is indistinguishable from true colour, and sometimes even 16 colours is enough.
People probably think that hiding part of their sig behind a spoiler tag saves bandwidth but it doesn't, it only saves visible space, all the pics are fetched anyway even if they're not displayed onscreen.
Do people think sig rules should be enforced? It is not a big problem for me and of course you can turn sigs off in your forum settings if it's a problem* (e.g. for dial-up users), but the rule is there so maybe we should discuss it.
*Incidentally unlike use of spoiler tags, turning sigs off in your control panel forum settings really does stop images being fetched - I just checked. On a typical forum page an extra 700KB of images were downloaded when i turned sigs back on! (This takes about 8 secs on my connection)
Tips on making smaller images
Photoshop is very bad for making bandwidth-friendly images since it adds much junk to them. Most photoshop jpegs can be shrunk by 10-30KB by running them through a lossless optimiser (such as the Irfanview one) to remove all the junk in the file header. Often even people's avatars are 30-40KB but after zapping the junk you may find the real image is only 5KB, the rest is just header data! Also setting the quality level a little lower can do wonders, try looking for a sweet spot where the size drops without the visual quality suffering. My current sig for instance (Tomo-chan) is only 19KB despite being 5 frames animated gif. (It took a lot of work though! I made it for a website where I had strict daily bandwidth limit and needed to keep each page c/w images under 50KB because of high volume of visitors.)
A lot of people are using PNG format - if you use JPEG instead it is typically 1/5 the size and indistinguishable unless someone looks closely at 200% magnification. I don't think I have seen any 200KB sig images that couldn't have been shrunk to 50KB with no noticeable effects. If using PNG or GIF because of need for transparency, try reducing colour depth, e.g. in images the size of a sig 256 colour is indistinguishable from true colour, and sometimes even 16 colours is enough.
