Before I make anymore free avatars and signatures for anyone, it appears I might misunderstand the signature and avatar guidelines for the d2jsp forums. Can I get some input on the subject please? I have a few questions.
1) There are guidelines for avatar and signature dimensions in pixels. I can definitely understand having limits for the signature since that can easily make reading a thread very disruptive if the signatures get out of control especially with height. D2jsp has been around since 2003 which was the age of square monitors. A good baseline of expected user resolutions was either 800x600 or 1024x768. A signature width limit of 400 pixels makes a lot of sense under those conditions. My question is a series of questions on this note: Does the 400 pixel width limitation still make sense? Is it still necessary? Is it actively enforced much? How long has that 400 pixel width limit guideline been in place?
2) Dovetailing with that is discussion of data size limitations. Any web host must be concerned with bandwidth usage as that is a metered overhead cost down to every last bit. Therefore, images should be as lightweight as possible to keep them from driving bandwidth costs through the roof and into bankruptcy. However, since the images are hosted on other sites like imgur, I don't imagine D2jsp is concerned about bandwidth costs of images hosted elsewhere. Then again, maybe D2jsp is billed for linked traffic in that regard? I'm not sure. Anyway, additionally in the era of square monitors I mentioned previously was also the era of dialup/dsl bandwidth needing to be accommodated. A page full of images that measure in the MB's instead of KB's would basically render a site unusable for low bandwidth users. Since D2jsp doesn't host the images and users have bandwidth built into the watch on their wrist that exceeds typical user bandwidth from the turn of the century by orders of magnitude these days, does D2jsp still need to be as concerned with image storage sizes? If so, are the concerns and specific limitations of image storage sizes set forth in the avatar and signature limitation guidelines still sensible and relevant as is as they relate to today's current technological capacities?
3) Lastly, though an avatar on here will never exceed 60x60 as the site automatically resizes that image during rendering of the page, should avatar images actually be uploaded to image hosts as 60x60 images? Like does it cause any additional harm/stress/etc to D2jsp or their users by linking an avatar image that is greater than 60x60?
I know a lot technically in some ways and am a complete idiot technically in other ways, so any clarification/confirmation on all of this is much appreciated. Thanks much!
