Thread: Forum Signature Size

Is it just me or has signature space consistently dropped since the forums first came out... I just went to update some of the numbers in my signature (Champ has been 75 for a while), and it will no longer allow me to save it without dropping another 50 characters... 250 character max, why are we declining in this little bit of personal space? I already had to reduce the size a while back down to what it currently is, now I can't even change a number.

Yeah I had I to reduce the names of the classes I play to 3 characters because it woulnd't let me change the character on my signature .

Kind of fail tbh .

Originally Posted by Kril

250 character max

Mine says 200 characters. Mind you, if you put in a lihnk yourself, it's not accepted, but when you let the forum ssytem put in exactly the same link (see my signature, auto-linked instead of hard coded) it is weirdly enough accepted. The system works in strange ways...

Perhaps we should all make a nice picture which contains all the info we want to place in our sig....Hard time updating though

Not sure why. According to some of the forum posters the current limit is 150 characters. The tool tip apparently says 200.

As to whether it is 150, 200 or 250 currently - No idea. I have no desire to count characters to find out. The limit has been reduced multiple times.

IMHO - The limit has something to do with optimizing forum performance and reducing costs.

Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

IMHO - The limit has something to do with optimizing forum performance and reducing costs.

Blocking the ability to put silly images into it would be the best way to achieve that as I see it.

I do my bit by disabling sigs. to help pages load a bit quicker, but the load on the server is wasted dealing with this sort of stuff. Forums are supposed to be about exchanging views, not e-peening one's crafting levels,etc.

Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

IMHO - The limit has something to do with optimizing forum performance and reducing costs.

Nope.

The limit has always been 1 image (which is only allowed if you use one of the sigs) and 4 lines of text. However through some of the changes made over the years the limits crept up to the point where some players have entire stories and nearly 1000 characters in their sigs and 10 characters in their posts. No one wants to read a thread of 5 word posts with 100 word signatures. It's not very attractive and it makes things hard to read.

We've simply gone back and tried to pull out the permissions that were allowing for unlimited characters, links, and images and enforcing the original signature rules that have been in pace roughly since these forums went live.

I guess it may be going back to the "original rules", but that doesn't mean much to us users for whom the "original rules" have never actually been applied.

I had more or less the same signature for 4 years before the system decided to count code into the character limit. That's probably the most annoying thing to me--my signature isn't even 3 full lines, but I can't use bold or italics to spice up the minimal information in my sig because the character limit includes BB code.

I mean, if people don't want to read a thread with 5 word posts and 100 word signatures, couldn't they just disable signatures?

Thread Display Options

Show Signatures
Show Avatars
Show Images (including attached images and images in [IMG] code)

You have the option to show or hide various elements of messages, which may be of use to users on slow internet connections, or who want to remove extraneous clutter from posts.

I never wanted to use a gawdy graphical image, that wasn't even my actual character. Then i saw some people had formatted text for signatures and thought that looked pretty nice. When i first tried to do that myself, i was trying the wrong codes and having problems. I contacted the site help techs, and received friendly and helpful information about how to tweak my signature. I looked into the BB codes and was able to come up with different colors, and my creativity went rampid. It took me hours to complete my signature, but it's pretty, is it not?

I just made this signature maybe two months ago or so, and was able to update it a couple times as i leveled up my hunter a bit. But then, i started to level my guardian up some, and when i tried to update my signature, i got an error message that it could only have 200 characters, including the BB code. I copy/pasted the entire code into MS Word to see the character count, and it shows around 1,416 characters. I almost cried, omg, all that work and now i can't change it or i lose it altogether.

I've posted in another thread about it, and have checked back regularily to see if there were any official replies. I've also tried occasionally to edit it again, in hopes it was a temporary bug and had been fixed. That's how i noticed yesterday that the character limit had changed from 200 to 250, indicating yes someone knows it's been changed, but still not allowing me to edit my signature.

It's not a graphic that needs to be loaded, and if people don't want to read multiple lines of text, they don't have to read it at all. As for listing all of my characters, that's because there is a lot of bashing on the forums. People assume you don't know what you're talking about because your character is a minstrel and not a [insert non-minstrel-class here]. By having that info in my signature, if i make a comment, people who want to bash me for not knowing what i'm talking about, can first see that i actually do have some experience to reference from.

Edit: Out of curiosity, i used MS Word to check my character count without the BB codes, and it says 242. Just there are so many color changes in it.

I think your signature is great, and not overpowering. I'd rather see the character limit go lower (if they really want to keep people from making walls of text), but not include code.

I'd like to see it bumped up to something reasonable. 200 characters is little more than a twitter post. The difference? People like to use COLOR in their posts. You add in color or anything else and you pretty much can't do anything. I disagree that no one wants to read 100 characters worth of words. 1000 characters, you're right, I don't.
I think 300-400 characters would be appropriate for this kind of forum.

Originally Posted by Sapience

The limit has always been 1 image (which is only allowed if you use one of the sigs) and 4 lines of text. However through some of the changes made over the years the limits crept up to the point where some players have entire stories and nearly 1000 characters in their sigs and 10 characters in their posts. No one wants to read a thread of 5 word posts with 100 word signatures. It's not very attractive and it makes things hard to read.

You have confused the bunny. No surprise that is pretty easy to do.

If the limit is supposed to be four lines, why have a character limit at all? Let the customers use all the formatting tags they want. A line is 80 characters. Often there is a carriage return and line feed as line terminators. Four lines without formatting could be 328 characters.

You can get a lot of words in if you allow mouse print for the text. That way they can pack more than 80 characters per line. Do not let them use a 4 point type which gives you 18 characters per inch. Require to use Pica (12 points - 6 characters per inch or larger).

IMHO - You must exaggerating about the 100 word signatures. Unless you are using something like Brilliant (4 point), you can not get 100 words in four lines. If you use the standard 80 character line, short words four characters and a space - you can only get 320 / 5 = 64 words in. Most people are going to run out of space in the 30 to 40 word range.

The solution is to restrict the line length. Restrict the number of lines. Restrict the font size make em use Pica or larger.

You are going to see people with 10 character names in their signatures. That is only 10 words. It is not hard to get three characters on a line with you have four lines.

I do get the issue of a post with "Signed" and four lines of signatures. You do not need character limits. Limit the visual space for the signature. Do not allow 4 point or smaller type.

IMHO - You restrict the number of characters in a signature while giving them four lines. You are encouraging players to write mono color - walls of text. The customer can not use formatting codes to break up the text.

My sig in plain unformatted text is 245 characters. 513 with the formating.

Still it wasn't breaking any of the original rules: it's less than 4 lines long and it doesn't combine pictures with text.


The reason there were sigs containing a whole story was because the rules weren't widely enough known, and too hard to find. Making the restrictions more strict punishes everybody, even those who were following the rules.

I really appreciate a nicely formatted signature. It makes the plain white text of the body of the post stand out more, making the thread easy to follow with visual breaks.

If I didn't want the decor, I'd disable signatures.

Ive done what I can to keep my sig to a min. It just displays my trials of being F2P and what I have unlocked

When F2P opened up I remember it being a limit of 5 lines of text and an image. I can probably reduce my sig length even further if I didnt have a character limit (including bbcode is horrid when I want to do certain colors)

For now it just stays out dated since I dont want to reduce it as I cant even fit what i have unlocked with 250 characters (including removing my character portrait)

For me, I'd love to have a bit more length in what I can add. I would like to put very brief info on my clone characters (all compiled as one), a link to the LoTRO Fan ART wiki, one for the Laurelin Fan Art thread, and a shameless plug to my own simple Fan Art page. As you can guess, even if it looked sleek, it wouldn't fit in due to all the bbc code needed.

Edit: Okay I managed to severly compress it all to nearly nothing by using bit.ly code. Ugly, but it works!

There are two things I personally feel are distracting with our signatures on this forum. They are: occasionally bright warning colors (red/yellow/orange) and the LoTRO signatures.

The first one I admit irritates my sensitive eyes (not asking for attention, just understanding) and goes against the gentle-on-the-eyes color scheme I've set-up here when logged in.

The second one, the images, easily takes up too much space. I have seen other MMO signatures which are much more slim and beautiful than these chunks of graphics.

While I doubt much would be done with the former, I have an idea for the latter.

Turbine could put in a graphic contest redesign to all users where we could submit .png [or .jpeg?] images that fit in a smaller area. Using CSS to fit the text in smaller isn't very difficult - I've done it for guild forums + websites and I'm honestly terrible with code.

The rewards could be a token gesture (5 trail rations, 1 health potion?) so the gift itself is not really as important as knowing that you've helped contribute to the website. Out of all the submissions, the company could pick 10 of their favorites, have a player voting system set up to eventually pick the top 5, then let users use one of 5 images available (even have a couple restricted to VIP users only).

Thank you for your time. Also, thank you Sapience for letting us know why we're getting the errors.

Well, it's bothering me that i cannot update my signature anymore. So i guess they win.

I want my little piece of artwork to be remembered in all it's glory. So, here is my signature, all the colors and design, that i have to give up now because of a change in rules...

~*~ Einior of Paur en Mellyn ~*~ Silverlode ~*~
~*~ Zeirlynn ~ 75 Minstrel/Jeweller ~*~ Zeirwyn ~ 75 Captain/Metalsmith ~*~ Zeirneth ~ 75 Champion/Weaponsmith ~*~
~* 34 Warden/Cook * 31 Hunter/Tailor * 26 Guardian/Woodworker *~
~* 26 Lore-master * 20 Burglar/Scholar * 20 Rune-keeper *~

Time to edit it down.

Edit: So i changed my signature to this, which works fine:

~*~ Einior of Paur en Mellyn ~*~ Silverlode ~*~
~*~ Zeirlynn, 75 Minstrel ~*~ Zeirwyn, 75 Captain ~*~ Zeirneth, 75 Champion ~*~
~* 35 Guardian * 34 Warden * 31 Hunter * 26 Lore-master * 20 Burglar * 20 Rune-keeper *~

But then i wanted to add two "~" to the last line to even it out, which would make the final result look like this:

~*~ Einior of Paur en Mellyn ~*~ Silverlode ~*~
~*~ Zeirlynn, 75 Minstrel ~*~ Zeirwyn, 75 Captain ~*~ Zeirneth, 75 Champion ~*~
~*~ 35 Guardian * 34 Warden * 31 Hunter * 26 Lore-master * 20 Burglar * 20 Rune-keeper ~*~

But i can't do that, i get this error...

"The following errors occurred with your submission
Your signature contains too many lines and must be shortened. You may only have up to 3 line(s). Long text may have been implicitly wrapped, causing it to be counted as multiple lines."

Come on guys.

Okay what now!?

I got rid of all my pretty colors, just made it all one color. It's worked fine for months, as i levelled up my Guardian and changed her level, and for the last couple of days as i levelled up my Captain.

I shortened my signature Monday or Tuesday, changing "Einior" to "Rîn" per the update. Last night i changed my Captain's level to 77 with no problems.

Today i tried to change it to 78... and now it won't let me update my signature, saying "Your signature cannot be longer than 200 characters including BB code markup." Before it said 250.

Why!?!?!?

Edit: Fine! Here is my rule-breaking signature as it has worked for so long already. I'll see what else i have to chop off to satisfy the rules, again.

~*~ Rîn of Paur en Mellyn ~*~ Silverlode ~*~
~*~ Zeirlynn, 75 Minstrel ~*~ Zeirwyn, 77 Captain ~*~ Zeirneth, 75 Champion ~*~
~* 53 Guardian * 34 Warden * 31 Hunter * 26 Lore-master * 20 Burglar * 20 Rune-keeper *~

Edit again: I just chopped off nearly all of the ~ and * from my signature, got it down to where my MS Word document said it was only 198 characters (yes including the BB codes), and it still gives me the 200 character limit error and won't let me save it.

Kinda sad to read this. I cant update my sig either.

Please, Turbine, relax this a bit. Please.

This is yet another frustration. Whats up with not letting us have what we had before? I just want to change my graphic from my LM to my Warden, using the same text as I have had since 2009. /grumble.

Come on, forum decision makers and designers.

Sapience made a great post in July about overly long signatures. No, they're not cool.

500 characters not including BBC was not long whatsoever.

Now it's 200 characters including BBC. BBC only affects size in one code and no others; this has absolutely nothing to do with keeping signatures at reasonable length because they don't make the signature any longer visually.

The signature I have below is pretty darn small, but legible and IMO nicely laid out. I cannot update my levels anymore because the new limit considers that much too large. I tried time and again to make it smaller, leaving it only with servers, names, and the only BBC being the two links with tiny URLs; links that go to LOTRO.com pages, by the way. That also was too large according to the new standards.

Can you please revert the signature requirements to something a bit more relaxed, that gives us the ability to list our servers, characters, levels, and a few average-sized links (or other BBC) with ease? The words I have displayed below are so much smaller than the LOTRO-given banner. If you're worried about people using too many lines/text space *and* the banner, why not give users two options:

Option 1: Bigger text limit, up to three or four lines, no banner.
Option 2: Smaller text limit, up to one or two lines, you get a banner.

That way you won't see any ridiculously long signatures and us who use signatures can display information like the signature I have below... and don't have to revert to something ugly or just completely vague and uninformative. I hope this sounds reasonable. And, of course, folks have the ability to turn signatures off if any sort of signature annoys them.

Please give us a more reasonable character limit.

Please?

With a cherry on top?