Signature and Avatar rules

[IBBoard]

OK, now that we have the new design, we need some signature and avatar rules. Signatures cannot be larger than 580x150px (580 wide) and no more than 30KB. Anything any wider/higher will be cropped and hidden by the forum, anything any larger and a thread could take ages for a 56K user to load it!

Avatars can be done remotely for now, but no avatar may be more than 100x100px. This should be restricted by the forum system, but I haven't tested it yet!

[IBBoard]

We now have a larger gallery of avatars, mainly from avatar packs available on phpBB.com. If anyone else has any avatar-sized artwork they want to submit, which isn't breaching copyright if we use it, then please tell me about it and I'll add it.

Thanks

[IBBoard]

Some extra information (which is actually covered by the ToS under "any other applicable legislation") has been added to the avatar selection area of the user control panels. When you choose an avatar, please make sure that you read this extra information regarding copyright.

[IBBoard]

Just to clarify, the original intention was that the 30KB signature limit also applied to the avatar as well (so a max 30KB avatar and a max 30KB signature), however this isn't very clear in the original post. After further consideration, and due to comparative sizing, avatars cannot be over 20KB. This is not a fixed limit, and I may drop it to 15KB as all of our avatars are single figure sizes, if not below 5KB.

The rules are now:

• Avatars
  • Max width: 100px
  • Max height: 100px
  • Max file size: 20KB
  • Legal rules: the image must either be your own work, be public domain, or be an image that you have permission from the copyright owner to use.
• Signatures
  • Max width: 580px
  • Max height: 150px
  • Max file size: 30KB (combined total of any and all images in signature)
  • Legal rules: the image/images must either be your own work, be public domain, or be an image that you have permission from the copyright owner to use.
  • Additional: All rules about posted content apply to signatures as well

Also, if you use images from elsewhere then please either host them yourself on somewhere like ImageShack or make sure that the website owner doesn't mind you hotlinking the image (using it directly on another site). Until I blocked external use of images on Skins@HWT I was losing a considerable amount of bandwidth to people stealing my thumbnails as avatars without my permission.