Topic awaiting preservation: Minimum Sig Requirements

Well, as the asylum grows, we continually get more and more new members coming in with sigs that... well... we'd sort of rather not see over and over again. You know the type. Large, typically over-filtered images or banners with a non-dark-red background color.

What about establishing a set of minimum requirements for sigs? Not very restrictive, but just to avoid the real nuisances. Then we could say "sorry, but your sig doesn't meet the minimum requirements; please remove it until you have created one that does. You can use the sig forum for your sig testing needs."

I'm thinking of simple things like...

1. sigs may not be over 200 pixels tall or 600 pixels wide
2. while transparency is certainly not necessary, the sig must aesthetically match with the background of the asylum. A bordered image, for instance, is fine. An image with a white (or bright blue) background is not.
3. sigs must contain original work by the creator (perhaps involving something other than filters).

Even these might be too restrictive.

Anyway, this isn't really *necessary*, it's just an idea, so we can have some standards to go by when we tell people "uhhhh... your sig isn't really... that great." You know?

Just an idea I'm throwing out there. If you don't like it, feel free to say so. =)

We've got some literature in various places:

:FAQ:
:FAQ:
:FAQ:


FAQs n' Bits: Michael

I don't like it.


Except for the establishing standards and putting them in place part.

heh

I usually hate limitations, but this one seems like a no-brainer. Plus if a person keeps it up (wasting load time with huge byte-sizes would be a hell of an *offense* too.) it could be a justifiable standard for editing out their sigs by Mad Scis.

Good idea Slime..I second this one wholeheartedly.

Oooh, new entry for the list:

4. There are 16,581,375 possible colors that can be displayed on a computer screen. Sigs must contain fewer than 50% of them.

Hee hee =)

Anyway, the goal is to create a way to make people work on their sig skills without having to blatently tell them that we don't like their sig; and hopefully in the process they'll learn how to surpass the minimum requirements. At the same time, we need to be careful to avoid limiting creativity.

Slime: As Michael has indicated we do have guidelines on this kind of thing and usually pointing and laughing (sorry peer pressure) is enough to get people thinking along the right lines so I suppose I'd prefer gentle persuasion to anything more rigid.

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

I think the FAQs are adequate. However, I'll be the first to admit there have been a few of my sigs that haven't met the guidelines spelled out there (particularly file size when it comes to animated sigs.) We just have to be sure to point out the relevant FAQ when we see an offender even if it is a long time asylum inmate.