Thoughts on Posting Guidelines

[audiopro]

Continued from posts in What's New forum:
http://www.seyberts.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1527


Aww shucks dags.. You think I am good looking?? Thanks! 8)

I feel that including images such as smileys serve a very important purpose other than stylish looks. They help convey emotion that cannot effectively be displayed through simple text. Conveyance of such feelings help others understand the tone in which things are meant to be taken. I can't tell you how many sarcastic comments I have seen that may be considered offensive to me if they were not accompanied by a winking smiley or the like.

As for avatars. My avatar is hosted from my server actually, not Seyberts. Based on my avatars size, and my current total posts, that would have saved them 5.4 meg of transfers. That is very little, but I choose to host it myself anyway. Additionally, avatars are not served from a database. The images are placed on a server, and a reference to that images location is stored in the database. Again, this takes very little overhead.

As said in a previous post it is searching and wading through posts that are reason enough to keep off topic posts limited.

[DZ314]

My avatar is also hosted remotely. I agree that smileys convey emotions which cannot always be correctly understood with just text. Much like when I say that something is dags' fault I use this along with it to signify that I am joking: ;)

[dags_lax]

Aww shucks dags. You think I am good looking??

Actually you have a face that is about as attractive as a mud fence. I was just being polite! :wink:

How about that. Over five hundred articulate, well thought out and researched posts based on a lifetime of learning and experience before I finally stooped to a cute little yellow smiley thing. :lol: Oh my god there is another one!

Anyway thanks for the info Audio. Like I said I am ignorant when it comes to such things.

[DZ314]

dags, those two smileys comprised a total of 506 bytes! ahhhhh!

506 bytes is very small compared to normal pics, but I suppose a lot of them can add up. I think the trade-off between their size compared to their usefulness is heavily slanted and in favor of the usefulness. :)

[audiopro]

Another efficient methodology used in the phpBB database is that even signatures are stored only once. Fury's sig is stored in one field in a table. Each posts simply references that field and concantenates it with the rest of the fields returned that make up the post.

Almost every aspect of the phpBB db is linked to common tables that simply link to each other.

[dags_lax]

506 bytes huh. Then we need to be judicious in our application of the little yellow smiley things and use them only when the situation warrants. :oops: Damn, another one. Sorry folks I don't know what's gotten into me.