Shadow Hog said:
So the only problem is that one person is tired of doing all the work? Then here's a proposal: recruit people to split the task up. Like, mini-mods of sorts, whose ONLY powers are to figure out who's over the limit and report it for an admin to take action later.
While this sounds simple, lemme explain the steps here, and why it's such a big deal to do this. As an example, I'll explain how the avatar loss worked, and why I'm SO glad to get rid of any and all of this once and for all.
Step 1: Someone notices an avatar beyond the limit, be it me or someone else. This is generally done by right-clicking absolutely every new image that comes onto the forums.
Step 2: I go into the administrator panel, delete the image, and disable their avatar privileges.
Step 3: I go into the Hidden Palace, and add the following to the logs: "<nickname> lost his avatar privileges. (<month> <day>, <year>)"
Step 4: After a week has passed, if it was the first offense, go back into the administrator panel, and undo everything. Then go back to the Hidden Palace and italicize the text to signify that the period has expired.
While in of itself this isn't that bad. The fact that I have to do this kind of stuff every day just plain sucks. It's tedious, annoying, and it's all because SOMEONE decided not to read the rules before doing something. Signatures are even worse because there isn't a way to disable signatures from the control panel, so I have to decide if the offense is strong enough to warrant a forum ban if they keep it up. To take you up on your proposal, I'd have to reinstate all of this structure again, and add another layer of complexity by having a group of people going around the forums doing step 1 for me that I'd have to keep track of.
Personally, I agree. These new rules are overly strict, annoying, and I shouldn't have to do it. However, I don't really see a choice if I value my sanity. This forum takes enough effort to maintain as it is, and I really don't want to have to keep dealing with stuff like this if it's not absolutely necessary.
Also, to the people complaining about the drop down to 10 KB for avatar, that's due to the fact that we rape Sepwich's bandwidth bad enough as it is. I don't wanna make it any worse than I need to. Honestly, if your avatar is bigger than 10 KB, you need to use proper compression. The drop to 128x128 is because that's what it was always intended to be. It became 144x144 because a while back, while it was 128x128, AJ made a 96x144 avatar, and it looked fine, so I upped the limit. What I had forgotten was that while 96x144 isn't going to make posts bigger, 144x144 sure will. Hence, when I realized that changing the way avatars would be set would wipe all the avatars anyways, I changed it back to what it was originally.
I know all these changes are annoying, and it's going to suck for a bit while we all adjust, but I assure you, this will be beneficial in the long run. Changes around here are always considered negative, especially when you lose something that you like. Remember the loss of the multi-thok? I loved that abusive move, and really missed it when it left the game, however I admit SRB2 is a better game because of it. It just took time.