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[Saracen]

fair enough, i will comply with this seen as though its a forum ruling and a big issue to the house keeping of the forum.
but before i post the second half of this reply can you just confirm that the size ruling you quoted is basic forum regulation and rules?

Thanks.

Yes, I can confirm that. There's an "Announcement", which appears system-wide, titled "Forum Guidelines", written by MD. The sig section says

Signatures

The forum allows each member to have a 'signature' that will automatically appear after each post. This can consist of text, graphics, or a mix of both.
We would be obliged if all members would keep signature graphics and text to a modest size, and follow some basic guidelines as to content.

Size : - Signatures should have a maximum height of 80 pixels (inclusive of text and graphics). Where graphics are used they should have a maximum width of 400 pixels and a file size of 30Kb or under

Content : - Content should not contain any elements likely to be offensive

Please note that while the size guides are not a hard and fast rule, we would be grateful if you could keep more or less to these guidelines. Also note that the board Administrators reserve the right to remove any signatures, with or without prior notice, that fail to conform and will very likely do so for anything deemed offensive.

There's a direct link to that announcement here

[redddraggon]

It was a typo, noticed it as soon as I pressed submit, but when I pressed edit on the post it wouldn't let me change the title like other forums do.

[Marcos]

It was a typo, noticed it as soon as I pressed submit, but when I pressed edit on the post it wouldn't let me change the title like other forums do.

Ah, fair enough, im still scared of people who do it on purpose though

[MadduckUK]

Does that come with a rumble feature...?

oscillating motion

[Salazaar]

oscillating motion

How about 'force' feedback?

[Magnets]

I'm with the small sig police brigade as well.

Me too, i hate when people have massive sigs that take up more space than the actual content of their post.

Are the sig rules just guidelines? or are they rules?
It seems a bit weird stating a maximum size, and then just saying it's only a guideline

[Saracen]

well, just copied a few sigs onto my desktop to use as a template size and such from various threads - noted atleast 12 other people with Sigs above the stated parameters with text inclusive which i was going to list but at the end of the day IM not here to tattle, especially when the number of posts from these people go into the thousands most of which HAVE mod responses in the threads. its all well and good putting quoted points, facts and your opinions but perhaps instead of trying to throw the rule book" at me - you should enforce your own rules and more widely, not just pipe up when another member puts his hand up and says "miss, miss, his sig is too big.
**so i will change the sig, and stay in the Gamers section of the site where less people require a rectal stick removed


** - there's your 'Light Hearted Humor'

If I see any overly large sigs, I will ask them to be resized/removed. If you care to point them out, that will be done. But I don't go around looking for them. Also, personally, I have sig display turned off, so all I see if a link and unless I specifically check the size of that sig, I generally wouldn't notice.

However, when it's pointed out in a thread I happen to be in anyway, I'll deal with it.

You haven't had the rule book thrown at you. There are forums where you would simply have had that sig removed without warning. With some mods and admins, that might even have happened here. It might also well have happened with me .... if I'd had more time pressures on me at the time it occurred. After all, we're all just volunteers here and have lives to lead and livings to earn, too.

For instance, when you see a rule break, it's nice to think that you'd explain it carefully to the member, perhaps PM or explain it. But think, after you've been making 10, 20, maybe 50 minor edits, sometimes daily, for several years, you start to get a little less tolerant of people that put you in the position of having to make those changes or edits simply because they can't be bothered to either read or follow rules. After you've done it hundreds or thousands of times, the novelty wears off.

So you end up spending 10 seconds doing an edit, rather than 10 seconds doing an edit and then 5 or 10 minutes writing an explanation of it .... and you've had considerably more than 10 minutes worth of time spent explaining it.


Look back at your initial response and try to see it from our side. First-off, it's your responsibility, as a member, to read and follow the rules. You didn't. Okay, not exactly a hanging offence, but ....

Next ..... it was pointed out to you that it was a rule break, and your response was "just my way of sticking it to the man!". Well, in that regard, I'm the man (or one of them, anyway) you say you're sticking it to. I showed that to the admin of another entirely unrelated forum and asked what his reaction would have been. He said "<expletive> cheek - I'd have banned him".

Instead, what you got here was the assumption that that comment, which was made without any sort of smiley or wink, was humorous rather than taking it literally as it appeared to mean. So the response, complete with winks, was that the man might stick it right back. That was a hint, by the way, to change your sig.

Your response was to state that you are ".... not going to change it ....".

Okay, AGAIN, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you hadn't realised it was a forum admin pointing it out to you, and quoting the rule on sizes. But a couple of others did point out it was coming from a Mod. The response ... the fork graphic, and still no change.

So I let the light-hearted hinting carry on again , with a hint about a sig-extractor tool, and AGAIN, no change of sig, instead a moan about how you've been using it for months. And I STILL didn't delete to for you.

In what sense is that having the rule book thrown?

[Saracen]

....

Are the sig rules just guidelines? or are they rules?
It seems a bit weird stating a maximum size, and then just saying it's only a guideline

It's kind-of a rule and a guideline. That doesn't help much, does it?

On a previous forum, there was a rule that gave specific maximum sizes. One member was asked to change his sig, and did so, making it precisely ONE pixel larger than the specified maximum. It caused some debate at the time as to whether this was deliberate or not. I'm inclined to think it was deliberate .... but who knows.

So .... now what? It's a sig that's over the size limit, but by one pixel. Do you appear anal and force another change for one silly pixel? Or do you let it slide?

If you let it slide, what do you do when someone is two pixels over? Or three? Ten?

Where do you draw the line between a sig that breaks the rules but not by enough to take action and one that breaks the rules that is enough to take action? And worse yet .... how can you explain to members what standards they have to work to in order to comply with rules ... without setting yourself up for some smartarse to go just a toenail over the line?

So ..... and I wrote that bit of the sig rule some years back .... we have a maximum size guide/rule that we ASK people to abide by. If it goes a bit over, well, whoop-de-do. We ignore it. BUT .... it's entirely at the discretion of the mod team to decide to allow or enforce, and we will not explain precisely what criteria we might use.

And, of course, we reserve the right to remove sigs without notice or warning.

In other words, yes, you're dead right, the wording is a bit strange. But it's designed to keep our options open and reserve some wriggle room, precisely because we've seen what rigidly enforcing rules can do. Members (and mods and admins are, after all, members) like to feel they're part of a community. That wording is specifically phrased to put the onus on people to be reasonable and behave as part of that community, in order to avoid (most of the time) getting in wrangles over rules in the first place.

And, almost all the time, if mods act fairly and reasonably, and when necessary, explain what might appear to be overly harsh or irrational acts, that membership stands fully and firmly behind the mod team.

It's not just about enforcing rules, but about being seen to be fair, even if firm on occasion. If this forum ever gets to be about mods team versus members, it won't (to me) be worth coming to. So, if you like, it's about governing with the consent and approval of the governed, and a LOT of that consists of presentation.

[Stewart]

If you have a Mac, not only does your sig get removed, but Kez beats you to death with a length of copper pipe.

So fink yourself lucky.

[Funkstar]

If you have a Mac, not only does your sig get removed, but Kez beats you to death with a length of copper pipe.

And calls you a gay?

[Stewart]

Repeatedly.

[Prime]

first off - i didn't get ANY form of humorous requests to change my sig size - i got a few smug comments from a group of randoms, a more direct " you need to make your sig smaller" would have ended this thread around 20 posts back, dance around that fact all you want but it would have - but proceeding.

"Stick it too the man" in your last reply you take this as im making a serious protest against some form of system that i'm actually CHOOSING TO USE. And i hardly think a sig outside of the guideline size would be my first choosing of "Sticking it to the man" but you then use this statement as a severity on my part.
if your actually mocking the time consumption you spend on telling these people the rules of the site then why beat around the bush and not just say it? surely thats saving alot more of your time.
you then brake down my thread replies post by post, making it look like its getting worse and worse and worse, yet you have replied in between most of these replies and not taken the action yourself.

this 'Other Admin' type you showed this post too - is it from the forum of the Gestapo? lol i linked the site to my manager and Co over my dinner and the FIRST thing he pointed out was: "there's people with text sigs bigger than yours, its pathetic" fair enough, the 'pathetic' was a bit too far but he was on the site 5 minutes and noticed this - would really call that moderating, just passing by, yet he seemed to notice. Even if you have sigs turned off - you were inclined by the people commenting on my sig which drew you too it.

im not going to gas on much longer as its 6pm and i want to go home but i will re-iterate my point from before, all this got escalated because of other users corsing you and there being no request for me to change it - just a group of people hinting around it. oh and i found this of interesting read:

"Please note that while the size guides are not a hard and fast rule, we would be grateful if you could keep more or less to these guidelines. Also note that the board Administrators reserve the right to remove any signatures, with or without prior notice."

aah, so the people with sigs larger or of equal size to me are allowed because its at your desecration. perhaps if i had a few more thousand posts i'd get close the the same courtesy.

Good night.

[Stewart]

first off - i didn't get ANY form of humorous requests to change my sig size - i got a few smug comments from a group of randoms, a more direct " you need to make your sig smaller" would have ended this thread around 20 posts back, dance around that fact all you want but it would have - but proceeding.

"Stick it too the man" in your last reply you take this as im making a serious protest against some form of system that i'm actually CHOOSING TO USE. And i hardly think a sig outside of the guideline size would be my first choosing of "Sticking it to the man" but you then use this statement as a severity on my part.
if your actually mocking the time consumption you spend on telling these people the rules of the site then why beat around the bush and not just say it? surely thats saving alot more of your time.
you then brake down my thread replies post by post, making it look like its getting worse and worse and worse, yet you have replied in between most of these replies and not taken the action yourself.

this 'Other Admin' type you showed this post too - is it from the forum of the Gestapo? lol i linked the site to my manager and Co over my dinner and the FIRST thing he pointed out was: "there's people with text sigs bigger than yours, its pathetic" fair enough, the 'pathetic' was a bit too far but he was on the site 5 minutes and noticed this - would really call that moderating, just passing by, yet he seemed to notice. Even if you have sigs turned off - you were inclined by the people commenting on my sig which drew you too it.

im not going to gas on much longer as its 6pm and i want to go home but i will re-iterate my point from before, all this got escalated because of other users corsing you and there being no request for me to change it - just a group of people hinting around it. oh and i found this of interesting read:

"Please note that while the size guides are not a hard and fast rule, we would be grateful if you could keep more or less to these guidelines. Also note that the board Administrators reserve the right to remove any signatures, with or without prior notice."

aah, so the people with sigs larger or of equal size to me are allowed because its at your desecration. perhaps if i had a few more thousand posts i'd get close the the same courtesy.

Good night.

Smelly face.

[finlay666]

first off - i didn't get ANY form of humorous requests to change my sig size - i got a few smug comments from a group of randoms, a more direct " you need to make your sig smaller" would have ended this thread around 20 posts back, dance around that fact all you want but it would have - but proceeding.

"Stick it too the man" in your last reply you take this as im making a serious protest against some form of system that i'm actually CHOOSING TO USE. And i hardly think a sig outside of the guideline size would be my first choosing of "Sticking it to the man" but you then use this statement as a severity on my part.
if your actually mocking the time consumption you spend on telling these people the rules of the site then why beat around the bush and not just say it? surely thats saving alot more of your time.
you then brake down my thread replies post by post, making it look like its getting worse and worse and worse, yet you have replied in between most of these replies and not taken the action yourself.

this 'Other Admin' type you showed this post too - is it from the forum of the Gestapo? lol i linked the site to my manager and Co over my dinner and the FIRST thing he pointed out was: "there's people with text sigs bigger than yours, its pathetic" fair enough, the 'pathetic' was a bit too far but he was on the site 5 minutes and noticed this - would really call that moderating, just passing by, yet he seemed to notice. Even if you have sigs turned off - you were inclined by the people commenting on my sig which drew you too it.

im not going to gas on much longer as its 6pm and i want to go home but i will re-iterate my point from before, all this got escalated because of other users corsing you and there being no request for me to change it - just a group of people hinting around it. oh and i found this of interesting read:

"Please note that while the size guides are not a hard and fast rule, we would be grateful if you could keep more or less to these guidelines. Also note that the board Administrators reserve the right to remove any signatures, with or without prior notice."

aah, so the people with sigs larger or of equal size to me are allowed because its at your desecration. perhaps if i had a few more thousand posts i'd get close the the same courtesy.

Good night.

http://forums.hexus.net/1342205-post13.html

[menthel]

I'm a random! Cool!

[moogle]

how big was his sig? anyone got a pic?