Join Pirates Against Bloated Banners (aka Wall of Shame)

This thread is being created as a community service to help end the completely ridiculous oversized signatures that some guilds are using for promotion. It's completely absurd and distasteful that they're using this tactic to CRAM their message down our throats while taking away our screen space. Well, I say if Midoki doesn't care about limiting users to a standard signature size, then let's all blow up our signatures! It's only fair.

Midoki, please publish rules about banner sizes and police them so forum users don't have to.

 

Example #1
Signature Height 265 Pixels
User was asked politely on at least 3 occasions to reduce text and save it for his guild page
You would think one of the top forum contributors would know better

 

Example #2
Guess I can't blame them, Black Flag started it
Signature Height 216 pixels
User was asked politely at least once to scale it down

 

Well isn't everything bigger in Texas? Just saying Tex!

 

@Raptelan it's not an issue of just turning off banners. Many of us want to see them but we need to draw a line on what's acceptable and what isn't. Go ahead and vote "No" to limited banner size if you feel that way.

 

A few months back, captains and crew of the longtime forum guilds agreed to a few guidelines for maximum signature banner sizes.

• No more than 120px high
• No more than 800px wide
• Keep additional text above and below to a minimum. No paragraphs.

We encourage all guilds to adhere to these guidelines for a few reasons:

1. Many people on this forum use mobile devices. Huge banners after every post make things even more difficult to read. (Being on a high-res PC screen doesn't
make it any better. Believe me)

2. Limiting the size means that no guild gets extra advertising simply for having a larger banner. Everyone has equal exposure, and the content of your banner is what makes the difference. This also avoids the trend of runaway sigbanner size increases that have plagued other game forums for years.

3. They're distracting, and make it more difficult to follow threads.

4. They increase page load times, and data usage for anyone not using wifi.

5. Sane banner sizes are just good forum etiquette, and using them lets everyone know that guild respects the forum and the community.

Yes, you can disable signature images like described above, but that is not an ideal solution. Many people may want to see the banners as long as they're properly sized.

 

When the people that run this forum tell me I need to resize my banner, I will be happy to. I had it made for me, and I love it, and after looking on the official Midoki info I saw no guidelines. I think it is reasonable and there is zero text underneath to make it longer. How about instead of a passive aggressive thread jut to stir up trouble you talk to the people that actually control the forums about your concern.

 

Ditto. Many forums I've been on in the past have had banner limitations.

Question though.. Can they limit the banner size without uploading the banners to the site? In forums I've been on in the past, banners and avatars were hosted on the forums, not externally.

 

Amazing how phrasing and approach can change something. I for one was unaware of this discussion and when being talked to as an adult I am more than happy to do what others have agreed on. Thanks Kelani for useful information.

 

I think you have a beautifully made banner. And I don't think that it's effect would be diminished by simply scaling it down a little bit. Maintaining the same. Aspect ratio.

No one can really make you. And it's not going to affect me hugely if you don't. But I know I would appreciate it.

 

Not an issue - again - all about approach. Will get the non pirating half to make it the appropriate size.

 

Not a problem, @PTO Plunderer Glad that helped, and I agree, it's an awesome banner. The size recommendations we agreed upon were pretty loose. Nobody wants to be overly-restrictive, so there's always be some wiggle room.

In your case, your banner is 160x770, so it is a little bit tall, IMO. Fortunately, like Bear said, it's easy to do a proportional reduction to get the height down to around 120px without anything being cropped, or affecting the scale (or equally importantly: text readability). If you don't know how to do that, and want to see how it looks, I'll be glad to whip up a resized version for you.

@Bear signature images hosted offsite can be set to a specific height or width with a simple tweak to the phpBB code, (ex: height=120px ) but the downside is that will only hardcode height or width, and that will scale up any images that are smaller than that set size, so it's not really an ideal solution there. If banners were hosted on the server, then they could be auto-scaled easily (like Avatars). Not sure if that's possible in phpBB, but if so, they should consider enabling it.

edit: In case anyone cares, my sig banner is an example of the low-end as far as recommended sizes. It's 71x522. I kept it smaller than normal to allow for extra text above and below

 

Now Im kinda salty a MOD edited my awesome signature

 

Hmmm show me these banners you speak of....

 

I will make you a lovely mod friendly one Fil..

 

Not too MOD friendly

 

Guess I need to hurry up and create an over-size banner to climb aboard the over-size banner bandwagon before it gets a stop put to it.

 

The members called out were asked "politely" to reduce banner size and the request was ignored.
I hope Midoki does publish firm guidelines and will police them.
It's a topic that's been ignored far too long.

EDIT: I will be happy to remove the offenders from my post if they will fix their banners.

 

Tame one for you to use or not I will make a different one later but i need a little time.

 

PTO are you putting the boot in?