Signature length

Mine's not doing well either. I tried to enter the HTML code for a progress meter and it wouldn't take it, telling me I'd exceeded the character count.

Same for me. I'm trying to update my signature and I get an error. I usually get the following:

"Your signature can not be longer than 600 characters including BBCode markup."

I'm not even adding any more characters, just changing a number in the word counts

tahni said:

Same for me. I'm trying to update my signature and I get an error. I usually get the following:

"Your signature can not be longer than 600 characters including BBCode markup."

I'm not even adding any more characters, just changing a number in the word counts

Click to expand...

Wow, we are totally on the same page. That is what I was trying to do and got the same error.

Mac limited the character length because some people were abusing the signature.

In at least one case, the person's signature helped cause a fairly nasty problem last Sunday.

dpaterson's suggestion is excellent, and Mac is paying attention to the thread; she gets why sigs are important.

Meself, I prefer posts that aren't 60-80% sig.

Rather than start my own thread (and get flamed for not searching the forums for the answer first) I'm necroing Sage's 3-year-old thread (instead of his 6-year-old thread of the same name) to ask:
Has anyone figured out the dynamics of this elusive 'BB code markup'?
My sig has 5 sets of characters, totalling 80 characters in all. Each set is linked to one of my SYW posts. I can't add any more text without it saying my sig is too long, and so I've removed my WIP word count (text only, no links.)

There is no way that 80 typed characters, plus BB code, plus link characters, equals more than 800 characters.

Can anyone point me to the answer or explain how to calculate the true character amount including BB code and links?

I've seen a lot of sigs that are much larger than mine, and include several links PLUS images. Does reputation or post count have anything to do with it . . . ?

Well, in the two hours since I posted my problem I've done some digging around and come up with two things.

1. At the top right-hand corner above the sig editor box (just as with the message reply box) there is a small 'A' icon for Switch Editor Mode. Pressing this while in sig editor shows you all the BB code. Lo and behold, when I switched Editor Mode I saw a whole bunch of code that I thought I'd got rid of, such as [FONT ] [COLOR ] [LEFT ALIGN ] etc. that was no longer visible on my signature. Removing this redundant coding took my signature character length down to about 550, removing at least 200 useless characters.

2. I came across a cool little website called Google URL Shortener (goo.gl) which I used to turn AW's quite lengthy forum URLs into very short Google ones, and of course they still link to the relative AW threads. Doing this has shortened my signature character length from over 550 to approximately 250.

I hope these little nuggets of information come in useful to other AWers!

ScottMc said:

I hope these little nuggets of information come in useful to other AWers!

Click to expand...

Scott I only just now saw this.

If you can't figure it out, PM me what you'd like in your sig, and I'll see if I can fix it for you.

But yes, it counts all the characters, BB code, spaces, etc.

Also; line breaks are sneak critters so watch for those too.

(My alternate Secret Identity is as an Admin for AW, And Welcome to AW etc. etc.)