A story

Once upon a time on AA land there was this girl that goes by the alias of FullMetalBabe, or FMB for short. She was SUCH a happy camper, with her Nutella by her side and photoshop open, she was enjoying herself quite well. She saw her signature on AA, because she is such a graphics freak, she decided she wanted to make another signature. She opens a new file, 400x125 so it abides by the rules, she was a good girl. She opens the picture folder from her computer and picks a random render, it looked eye catching to her so she said "I need to make a signature out of this".

The render was of a young, beautiful, drawn girl anime style, she is an anime lover after-all. She drag and drops the render on photoshop, looking at the girls' color scheme she decided to go for pink theme, it would suit the best plus it was her favorite color. She begins by painting the background layer a very pleasant pink color, #d54f80 to be exact. Using half-tone brushes, liquify, gradients and SavingsBond font at 12px, anti-alising being sharp, and for effects she used gradient overlay #ededed to #ffffff and stroke at 1px, outside position, normal blend mode 22% opacity fill type color with #5b0021 as the determined color.

She was happy with the results, actually, she was ecstatic, she couldn't wait to post it on AA and use it as her signature. The happy camper, FMB, was browsing the User CP section, took her a bit to find "Edit your signature" since she was busy saving the beautiful signature as a PNG. As she goes and checks that she did everything alright, she becomes worried, if she remembered right, the maximum upload size is 19.x KB, she goes check her already finished signature to see how many KB it was, such a masterpiece didn't come with cheap quality. She opens her Picture folder and then goes to the signature subfolder where she keeps all the signatures she has made, the folder contained 282 signatures, not counting the subfolders for special signatures, logo, banner, and non-anime signatures. She goes and searches, she was very smart and saved with a unique name, "Wolf Girl" which was the name of the render. She clicks on it and discovers a dreadful truth... 79.3KB.


/end

 

What if she placed her beautiful image in a folder on her very own website and linked to it on AA so that she had no restriction on those evil KBs.

 

The girl does not know that trick, would you be so kind to enlighten [strike]me[/strike] the girl?

 

What the girl might do is fire up her FTP client. Then her best path would be to connect to her site. Now, she needs to upload her picture to a folder on her site, and it is up to her to choose whether or not she wants to create a new folder or use an existing one. She might even leave it at the base of her website (public_html or somesuch), but that would make for a messy directory, so she's recommended not to use that approach.

Once her beautiful pic is uploaded to her site she might then edit her signature and manually add her link to her wonderful creation.

That would be in the form of:

Code:

[ img ]http://www.hersite.com/herimagefolder/herimage.png[ /url ].

But she needs to keep in mind that the link above is not her link, and that she needs to remove the spaces in the tags.

She might be tempted to just fill in her image link in the box allowing her to upload her magnificent image, but she should avoid that temptation as he image would still be subject to those awful KBs.

 

;( We can only upload, and I knew that method ;(

 

I'm sorry.

Would you like me to host it for you?

I can even give you your own folder if you'd like.

 

D: AA doesn't allow outside Embeds, meaning it doesn't allow ;~; I'd be bugging you if we tried that.

[strike]I'll see if saving it as a GIF[;~;] reduces the kb.[/strike] Nope, I just tried and still saves as 33.18 kb.

 

isn't the [img ] tag basic bb code?

 

Yeah, but it's not enabled here for signatures, you have to upload your signature and can't use only [sigpic][/sigpic]

 

That's a dumb limit, Chris. You're limiting some creativity here, and there are lots of graphic artists here that probably have some sick signatures that they can use.

Either turn on external embedding, or allow larger uploads. I have to agree that the limits are severely (and unnecessarily) limiting.

 

Please, Dave, don't hold back. Tell me how you really feel about our restrictions. :spin:

 

No, you don't want me to do that. I can bring up paragraphs.

 

282 signatures, wow. You've been busy, I mean the girl has been!

 

I have more, that's just one folder out of some couple of thousands I have.

 

Good work, should start your own Online Graphics Store or something.

 

It's coming....

 

Save the file as an 8-bit PNG and see what your file size is.

 

Awesome yo, cant wait

 

Thank you for that, it's still at 22.1KB. ~_~ The thing refuses to be exposed.

 

If you made it 399 X 124, it would probably fit. Though I suggest trying to upload it as it is at 22.1K. vBulletin will attempt to resize it to get it to fit.