We could probably whip up something to do that. The only situation I can think of where that won't work is for the small handful of animated GIFs we have as banners, which (no offense to their owners) I don't necessarily like having in the header anyway.

I'll write a test script to do it tonight and run it on all the banner files we have to see how good/bad they look.

Yeah, that's a good minimum I suppose, but still it doesn't allow for narrow browser windows. I dunno, clearly I am in a distinct minority here, it's just that I really, really like being able to have several windows open at once. (FWIW, my main computer has a 1680x1050 monitor, so this has little to do with my available resolution.)

the narrow banner problem is actually fixed in the dev version of mudbytes, where it doesn't wrap. i'm assuming if this portion of the design stays, so will the fix.

If I might make a suggestion about the banners, however… Would it be out of the question to limit their size to no more than 250kb? At home, it's no issue, but at other places (like work) where we are on dialup, it takes the site a really long time to load when a certain banner pops up that is about 1.25 mb, and speaking for not only myself, one of the nice things about this site is how much quicker it is to load than other MUD resource sites. The small banners are really no annoyance, but I imagine for people on dialup, anymore than 250kb really slows down the site, and would more than likely just lead to blocking them.

I don't block the banners here, by the way.

Or, if you don't just restrict it, maybe add that somewhere as a suggestion, and consider messaging those MUDs with banners bigger with that to ask if they would mind cutting their image down?

We can definitely limit the file size of the banners. We might already, it's just probably set too high.

I had quite a bit of success resizing all the banners with mogrify, it's just a matter of whether or not people are willing to have their banners forcefully resized.

It's not that difficult to make a banner to fit the size, and I think it reflects much better on your MUD when you do… Maybe also suggest they create a banner with the specific dimensions given?

250 kb seems rather small….

For a gif, jpg or png file, 250kb is plenty in file size. It's when you start adding animation to the file that the size becomes a bit limiting. But small is what you would want to be aiming for when considering those on dialup trying to access your site.

I'm of the camp that animated gifs are not necessarily desirable. (That counts for sigs, too. :tongue:) So yes, 250kb is definitely plenty for such a small picture.

250kb is rather huge for a such small image.

Even an animated gif would need to be intense to break that.

Most of them prolly won't break 50.

Edit: My sig image is 24 and the image quality is quite nice i think.

56k is actually less than 7 kb/s. Which means loading 2 250kb banners is going to take them over a minute each time they refresh the page.

It's funny I post yesterday about how those banners slow this down so much at work because of dialup… and today we get DSL.

But even done right, and 250kb should be more than plenty of file size. Our banner is animated but only takes up 142kb.

It's those banners that try to emulate flash fades and such that gets ridiculous.

I do quite like this skin:
http://www.extremepixels.com/forum/index...

If you could design something similar to that as the default skin.. :biggrin:

I think all of the Admins have agreed not to go with a fixed width layout. If memory serves, I mocked one up for the original design and we ended up finding we didn't like the way the forums looked. That layout looks alright, although right now we don't have anyone who can do the creating and slicing of the graphics for a skin like that.

Right now we're basically working on a lesser revamp of the current template since it seemed like the consensus was that the current color scheme (the orange/blue/black) seemed to work for most people and we wanted to retain our "look".

Whew, happy about the no fixed width…..Here's what that links looks like on my monitor.



Asylumius: I tried to edit the bbcode's height/width, not knowing it doesn't support that (or im doing it wrong). Carry on.

oh wow, your ss messed up -this- skin.

Should look into thumbnailing posted images I suppose.

spacer image in the left column would do it.

That won't solve the huge image stretching past the right side of the screen though. I'd rather have it thumbnailed to a maximum size if it's larger than something we set for it.

That would be good, I think… anything bigger than (ballpark) 200px in either direction should probably be a thumbnail instead.

I'll second (third?) the motion. :)