Reg. Linux User #211409 *** multibooting since 1992
Primary: 42.3,TW,15.0 & 13.1 on Haswell w/ RAID
Secondary: eComStation (OS/2) & 42.3 on 965P/Radeon
Tertiary: TW,15.0,42.3,Fedora,Debian,more on Kaby Lake,Q45,Q43,G41,G3X,965G,Cedar,Caicos,Oland,GT218 &&&
is 256 characters, what I wish to save (actually quite a bit more, with spaces following commas), a minor change from the current 253 characters. These counts are based on copy and paste to local file, as the page makes no apparent attempt to let me know ahead of time whether I am over the stated limit of 256. Site will not let me save, claiming
Your signature cannot be longer than 256 characters including BB code markup.
Under the edit window is a bunch of apparent settings, such as allow BB * code, with no apparent way to change any of them. I don’t know what BB code is or whether I am using any, but probably wish to use none (no for each). ASCII text is good enough for me. What can I do? Is “BB Code” converting each 0x0D into 0x0D 0x0A? Is there a forum software bug at work here?
AFAIK BB codes are the codes inserted to make bold, italic, smileys, whatever that looks like 1 character or no character at all when displayed, but nevertheless take several characters in the raw text.
I doubt you have them in the text you show but for me that is an ununderstandable bunch of numbers and letters, so I may have missed something.
Edit:
I do not know how this is stored in teh database, but it could be that “end of line” is done in HTML: <br>. But again that would have prevented your existing Signature from being saved also.
Of course, it could be as simple as taking out one or two characters, or abbreviating something, a simple thing to do while in your Forum settings, just to see what happens, then going from there.
… something that I would have tried by instinct even when I was a total noobie.
I did that hours ago, but apparently got distracted before I remembered to submit before closing the tab while in preview mode. Such disappearing has been happening much too much here lately.
I’ve already done too much abbreviating and substituting. It doesn’t work like snapper where going back to an arbitrary version is possible.
It’s not a simple thing to do, to know how many are OK or not. Of course adding and subtracting can be tested, but the way it’s being handled by the software is unnecessarily clumsy, too much ado about something that should be trivially easy. If there’s to be a limit, where that limit is should be obvious. The actual tested limit is 253 (saved to file with no terminating newline), not the announced 256.
On Wed, 02 Jan 2019 23:46:03 +0000, Knurpht wrote:
> Reducing the extensive info to something more readable to others? IMHO
> to almost all users the current sig is a lot of abbreviations without
> meaning.
Might be worth documenting in a personal wiki page and linking to rather
than trying to fit it all in a signature.
I think the original question was not if it is a good idea to make a so called “signature” that contains a lot of (non?)-information about every piece of hardware/software that one has lying around, but about how many characters the VBulletin software the forums use allow in such a signature. While they apparently try to tell that to the end-users in terms of characters aand BB codes, I guess it is simply 256 bytes (which btw means that using Unicode outside the ASCII range will also fill it up sooner.
I assume the answer to that is: yes, it seems to be 256 bytes, and that is it. I doubt anybody from the forums using Vbulletin will file a feature request for enlarging this.
The other thing is if it is a good idea to have so much of unreadable information (yes, I am biased and this is a Ceterim Senseo) in the signature. IMHO the signature was designed for what it’s name expresses. A name, maybe an address (of any kind: postal, telephone, e-mail, …e), a qualification. Just a few lines, for which the designer thought that 256 bytes would be ample. This type of usage is, for me, confirmed by the fact that changing the signature will show that signature in all your posts, even if they are re-called from many years ago. And reading a post from say 2000 where the poster tells he uses Leap 15.0 make this ridiculous. But when your telephone number changed, it is a fine thing that the correct number is attached to old posts.
I also hate it when reading a first, problem descripting, post in a thread, where I then have first to scroll down towards the signature, to read which hard/software is implied by the poster e(and then find out he uses systems with different openSUSE versions, so which one is applicable, or maybe forgot to update the information the last few years).
No, I am not a fan of puting this information in the Signature. But others may of course think different.
