Geocaching Australia

Is the signature feature working or not? I thought I had set one up but I haven't seen hide nor hair of it on my last lot of posts

signatures are turned off in order to keep the forums more readable

It would be nice to standardize on the size of Avatars too - I find they are very distracting when they are all over the place, they tend to dominate the page, and they also take longer to load/render. The profile suggests -

....Only one image can be displayed at a time, its width can be no greater than 30 pixels, the height no greater than 30 pixels, and the file size no more than 6 KB.

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The other day when I checked 11 people had Avatars, only one was below this suggested size (Bear_Left). One was even 116x154! I know this size is only a suggestion and it can be changed by the admin - personally I think 30x30 is a bit small, but on the other hand 116x154 is rather large. 50x50 maybe?<p>

No flames please, it's only a personal opinion, as much as Ideology don't like signatures, I'm not keen on large avatars, I don't like brussel sprouts either, but that's a different story

Horus wrote:I don't like brussel sprouts either

Well it all depends on how you cook them...

...I would suggest scoring the bottoms and placing in a large pot of boiling water. Once tender put into a.....

fair enough horus
we want to keep the forums quick and clean for everyone
what file size and dimensions do you think are reasonable?

ideology wrote:fair enough horus
we want to keep the forums quick and clean for everyone
what file size and dimensions do you think are reasonable?

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In my previous post I suggested 50x50, I think this was the default when the board started up. The 6k file size seems ok, most people should be able to get an image that size under 6k.<p>

I guess it depends on the avatar itself - without being obsequious, your Ideology avatar, although it's larger than 50x50, looks neat and tidy. <p>

embi wrote:..I would suggest scoring the bottoms and placing in a large pot of boiling water. Once tender put into a.....

<p>

Tried that embi, they still tasted like crap <p>

oops we missed your suggestion
we've resized ours to 50x50 and it looks even neater and tidier, ha!

our view is that anything over 75x100 is starting to get cluttered, but why not start a poll on to see what everyone's view is and we can use that as a yardstick?

the reason we are more strident on signatures is that they are embedded in the message and you can't stop them displaying once they are in. but, the good news for you is that the avatars are displayed as the page is generated for your view. this means that if we hack the code we should be able to remove all avatars from your view but leave them in other people's view. we'll take a look in the next couple of days.

What about providing an "avatar bin" somewhere on this site for people to drop their avatars in?
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I note that Team Frogger is using Tripod to store theirs. Tripod however doesn't like remote links to images and sends an alternate image back to the requesting site.
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Also an avatar bin would enable you to resize any avatars to the required display size via PHP. But I guess you know this i!, since you taught it to me

The Ginger Loon wrote: Also an avatar bin would enable you to resize any avatars to the required display size via PHP.

I have this on www.auspug.org
phpBB2 allows you to limit the size of uploadable avatars.

So far, I have about 90 avatars uploaded and it's about 340k hdd space.
It would also increase page rendering time since you don't have to wait for offsite images to load from slow servers.

I have :
Maximum Avatar File Size: 6144 Bytes
Max dimensions: 100 x 100

RedDwarf wrote: I have this on www.auspug.org
It would also increase page rendering time since you don't have to wait for offsite images to load from slow servers.
Maximum Avatar File Size: 6144 Bytes
Max dimensions: 100 x 100

Auspug looks quite neat, as the 100x100 fits into the available space for all except 1 line messages. And we're all more verbose than that...

Local storage is also a good idea for those poor folk without their own webspace to store the image, too.

(Not sure why page rendering time would _increase_ with local storage, but...)

ideology wrote:
...but, the good news for you is that the avatars are displayed as the page is generated for your view. this means that if we hack the code we should be able to remove all avatars from your view but leave them in other people's view. we'll take a look in the next couple of days.

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I love the sound of that, if I was given the chance to turn off avatars, I'd certainly use it.

You got me, Bear. I meant increase page rendering speed!

Didn't realise I was in contradiction of the avatars size limits with my logo.... must resize it again....... must do some more reading here too

no worries swampgecko, we are only just starting to discuss the sizes now

we'll take a look at the avatar bin idea - we didn't want to use our bandwidth to keep re-displaying the avatars, but if we keep them small it might be okay

in the meantime, we've put in a one-line hack that should disable the avatars for horus. horus, have they disappeared for you? if anyone else wants them disabled, please let us know.

If anybody has avatar hosting probs you can send them to me as i have a spare 20mb that was put aside for the previous forum. Please send them at a reasonable size as i dont want to send time resizing them.
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