Sig restriction

[CmdrFly]

QCDN supports signatues up to 550w x 250h pixels and 65000 bytes.

Why the size restriction? I'm working on a sig for someone, and the detail goes for crap and completely destroys it if I drop it below 65kb as a .png.

The image is hosted on a personal site, hence they are getting charged for it and not QCDN. Does the restriction still apply?

I seem to recall asking this before, but can't find the thread.

 

[Sculli]

Will you be using solid background? Check:

Your original one ~98k, the one I uploaded ~36k.
The bird symbol is a bit too large in your original, but it's just to show how file size could be dropped if you are using solid background and if that background isn't "required".

65k is just a number I made up.
It's not a QCDN bandwidth issue, it's a clientside issue (though maybe these days less of one). The rationale is that those on dialup, or slow Internet in general have a hard time if they have to download 10 sigs that are large.

Of course most QCDN users are repeat users, and will conceivably have the sigs cached, and not all posters have a sig image, and sig images are only shown once per page, no matter how often a user posts.

Just make the sig and see how big it turns out, under 100k would be good. Though this is something I am not all that picky about as long as it's not like 300k or something like that.

Will update the sig guidelines.

 

[CmdrFly]

I figured it was along those lines, worry about users with slower intarweb connections. The one I'm working on does need a transparent background; it's currently at 230k but unfortunately not done yet.

What did you do to reduce the size of the example above? I'm using PS6 at work, but upon saving a .png you are given two quality options: Normal and Interlaced.

I do have CS available on other systems here if that version provides quality scaling options.

 

[Sculli]

What did you do to reduce the size of the example above? I'm using PS6 at work, but upon saving a .png you are given two quality options: Normal and Interlaced.

Choose "Save for Web..." or something like that.
Then you can select PNG-8, adaptive colors, tranparency, and even reduce the colors from 256 to 128 (which is fine for most sigs without really noticable quality loss).

 

[CmdrFly]

Snazzy, thanks... unfortunately most of the options bone the sig (PNG-8 and it's subsidiary options, I should say). I think it's just the detail of the overlay that's keeping it so high; I was able to get it down to 198kb as non-interlaced but that's it. I'll do what I can. There's a lot of layers lapping over transparency and off, I presume that may be another reason it's so large.

 

[Sculli]

That is pretty large.
I'd be interested to take a look at the sig just to get an idea what kind of details you are talking about.

Feel free to upload the the QCDN gallery, bandwidth hasn't been a hosting issue for some time, there is plenty of it, the reason I had to move up in hosting was mysql memory usage.

 

[CmdrFly]

Sent by PM, it's unfinished so do not want it seen yet.

 

[Vandoura]

65k is just a number I made up.
It's not a QCDN bandwidth issue, it's a clientside issue (though maybe these days less of one). The rationale is that those on dialup, or slow Internet in general have a hard time if they have to download 10 sigs that are large.

Well too bad for them lol,
you can easily get a boardband connection for really cheap nowaday, is too bad they can't load it up fast enough, they need paisant (What ever it spell )

 

[evanos]

Well too bad for them lol,
you can easily get a boardband connection for really cheap nowaday, is too bad they can't load it up fast enough, they need paisant (What ever it spell )

It is true that people can get broadband pretty easily nowadays, some people are still in areas that do not offer that service or are unable to get it (because many that play FFXI still live in parents house and live by their rules). I think Sculli put this in place for them, or maybe they just dont want to see half of the page be signatures.

 

[Sculli]

I looked into this, and according to stats about 7% of QCDN users are on dialup. This number is likely somewhat lower than the actual percentage as dialup users are identified by their IP as bein in a dialup pool, and things like AOL users on dialup or any other major network users on dialup do not show up with a dialup IP address.

I think that upping the sig limit from 65k to 100k is as far as I am comfortable with at this time, should the dialup user number shrink further I can imagine to add another 50k to it at some point in the future.