Hi now that the Forums are getting a revamp perhaps you could add the future of allowing forum members to have 'sigs'
If you are worried about brandwith or people putting up naked pictures make it so that people with more then... 500 or a 1000 posts will be able to have sigs
Having a sig picture is really useless, the only interest is to completly mess up forums with lots of pictures that make the discussions hard to understand.
Actually I don't. And, if I'm on a board that doesn't allow you to turn them off, I use FireFox and end up add-blocking every one I see. It's a waste of space and bandwidth and adds nothing to the discussions.
We have Avatars, why do we need Sigs? All they do is take up half the space on the page, whilst annoying anybody who tries to read them, since we all know most [censored] can't help themselves from using 800x600 sigs.
Your own sig right now, if replaced by an image, would possibly shrink by a line - and of course, anybody who doesn't want to look at sigs can just turn off sig display altogether.
What about people with crap connections? I have a terrible connection on barracks, image sigs would kill page load speed. I'm sure there are plenty more who have that too.
Neither do avatars. Sigs, just like avatars, are an easy visual identification for a poster.
You generally see the avatar and identify the poster before you see the signature because the signature comes after the post, you know.
Plus, even if you get rid of avatars (which wouldn't bother me too much) you don't gain all that much realestate. Big stupid graphic signatures, however, do take up tons of screen space.
An average graphic signature is not much larger than your text signature - and as pointed out you can just choose not to look at them.
PS: By the same arguement by which a sig doesn't help, avatars don't help because they're actually left of the post. It honestly makes no difference, some look down some look left. I personally prefer signatures as identifiers.