Better signature limiting options

[Jaxx]

I would love this also.

[msimplay]

keep the signatures coming into this thread maybe someone might do something :P

[Silverstangs]

I want in on this request too, I'm getting a little tired of asking members to shrink their signatures, and editing them is also annoying.....

[mcyates]

is anyone going to act upon this request?

[SupraT]

Don't think so, I even posted in the pay for services forum and received no interest. Which is odd considering the the interest in this thread alone, it is obviously the community wants it.

[mcyates]

Originally Posted by SupraT

Don't think so, I even posted in the pay for services forum and received no interest. Which is odd considering the the interest in this thread alone, it is obviously the community wants it.

Yes, i have a lot of problems with the sizes of signatures and the amount which people posses. This would be fantastic, honestly if a free boards has is phpbb then I think vBulletin should have it, we are paying customers, our comments must heard and something done about it.

Then again, they might be already doing it but keeping is quiet. (I hope)

[Khaine]

I'll add my name to the list of thinking this would be very useful for our board, some of the people keep on changing their images to 2 meg animated gifs, or an image that 600x800, and I don't have the time to go and edit them over and over again

[cinq]

I am for this too. Should be default features in vb3

[kyrnel]

The problem with sig limit hacks is there are too many options and never one that will do everything everyone wants.
Everyone is guessing at what limits will keep sig size under control, but I have seen this hack running on sites that still have sig size issues. It is too easy to circumvent if you just use a few criteria like this.

There is a CSS2 attribute called max-height that will allow you to restrict the height of a table or div tag. But it isnt supported in IE yet. Hopefully soon, because this is really the only way to effectively limit sigs (other than not allowing text tags or only allowing a single image and controlling its size).

If you allow vbCodes and/or images, then it is virtually impossible to restrict the sign size without a very complex hack. It would essentially need a long list of rules to determine how much space the sig will actually take. For example, number of carriage returns, size of text on each line, use of quote tags (or other tags that take more space than normal), smilies that are larger than a single line of text. Then if you allow images, the size of the image must be known and added to the approximate size of the text portion of the sig.
Then, you can probably estimate if a sig will be too large or not. So what? What are you going to do then? You can't just truncate the sig. You would need to wrap the sig in a fixed height div tag. But what if they edit thier sig to make it shorter. Now it is wrapped in a fixed height tag that makes it larger than it needs to be.
Do you just turn off thier sig if it is too large? The idea is to minimize administrative work, not add it. So I woulnt recommend this if you dont want to have a long discussion with every person who's sig is too long.

So the only really effective solutions are:
1) Some sort of tag that will contract to the contents and expand up to a set limit. As far as I know this only exists as a CSS2 attribute that is not supported in IE or Mozilla (only Opera right now). Who knows when it will be supported and then you still have no control over people with older browsers.

2) Only allow a single image with controlled max width and height and no text.

3) Find someone to create hack much more complicated than even the hack being requested here (which you are having no luck with).

One possible hybrid solution would be to make a system that made it easy to add and remove a heght limited div tag. Maybe a button that your mods could see that they click to apply the fixed height div tag. I could write that hack if anyone was interested.

[SupraT]

If it is so hard, why does PHPbb and IPB have it ? Seems to work fine there.