Testing New Software

Test new signature code.------------------
--EvC Forum Administrator

My signature is not 100 characters long. ??????------------------
Signature too long, 100 chars max.

Would you believe I added another bug? You would? I thought so.I've upped the limit to 200 characters so that you're not affected. Would you believe your short little UBB URL translates to this: I'll fix this very soon to do the check before the translation to HTML.------------------
--EvC Forum Administrator

I could just write it in straight HTML?------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com

Oh, sure, but the fix is still necessary, because even without the surrounding UBB URL code it ends up greater than 100 chars in HTML.

Testing signatureMoose------------------
Signature too long, 100 chars max.

Your signature exceeds 100 characters because of the translation of the [URL] code into HTML. It's actually 366 characters. I can see that it might be desireable to go another direction with signatures.What I could do is use Server Side Includes (SSI) for signatures. This means that the text of the signature wouldn't be appended to the end of messages anymore. It would instead be placed in a file which is referenced from the message with an SSI. This means that when you update your signature it would be immediately reflected in all messages where you used your signature. Length of signature would no longer be an issue.Of course, this would have disadvantages. For example, you might write in the body of your message, "There's a link to what you're looking for in my signature at the bottom of this message." If you later remove the link from your signature then it would be immediately removed from all messages, including ones where you referred to it.Hmmmm. What to do, what to do.The length limit was placed on signatures because of abuse. A couple people had very long signatures. 300 characters seems more than enough, but all it takes is a single URL with a long address to exceed that, and URLs are pretty desireable for signatures.I'll let member feedback govern whether I make the signature change to SSI or not. It would allow signatures of any length with almost no overhead, but it *does* have potentially undesireable side-effects.In the meantime, I'll set the limit to 500 chars, but only to make inclusion of URLs easy. People with long textual passages in their signatures will be asked to remove them.------------------
--EvC Forum Administrator

Actually, I was looking at removing the URL from my signature.I had also done some other modifications to it today (some text removed, some text added).My problem was, even without the URL, my desired signature text came out to a bit over 100 characters.I don't currently post very many messages, and have pretty much ceased using the signature. But the current form of it is something I'd like to occasionly throw out, even though it wouldn't be every message.Moose