Look What You've Done

So, hmm, it's 2012. I'm sure the staff are well aware of this, and yet some really weird design decisions that stopped making sense in 2001 are still floating around it seems. I complained once before at the lack of actual decent linking tags that went unnoticed by anyone, though I'm not all that surprised. I mean, who even looks at this section (without prompting) anymore?

Anyway, getting off-topic a little. My issue this time is fairly different, as the title might imply. I just recently tried to change my signature to include an image that I didn't steal off someone else's (heh) for the first time in, umm... 3 years or so and ran into an interesting error message:

quote

System returned the following error(s):

Your signature is linking to a graphics file that fails to meet the image dimensions requirements. Images in signatures may only be 125 x 575 (height x width).

This is such an incredibly arbitrary numerical value and I don't even get the logic behind it. It's not even a nice round number, so I don't know what the heck. If it was 150x550 or whatever it'd have the same max area but make more sense. My main issue, though, isn't with the width but with the height. Screen real estate (which I'm sure plays into it somehow) isn't an issue anymore given how, as I said in the first sentence, it's 2012. For technical reasons I'm using a netbook laptop at the moment for, well, everything and my screen is still more than big enough to accomodate images over thrice as tall with plenty of room to spare!

The image I tried to use in question is this:



Not very big, is it? It's only 180px high... but that's not good enough for some reason. Y'know, apparently despite taking up less space than a ton of other images you can find in people's signatures it's apparently too big. It's even a small enough filesize to accomodate that limit (barely 45kb, despite being "too big" in size so there's no corrolation there either), so that's got nothing to do with it. Like, this is an image on any other forum I could use without issue but not here, because it's not within the inexplicable and arbitrary size that doesn't even fit any sane and known resolution. I'm sure there is a reason for it being so arbitrary small and yet bizarrely wide, but whatever it is I doubt it holds true anymore. 10 years ago, when the site started no less, the image size would've made sense then but not now. Times have changed, technology has changed, hell Neo's servers themselves have no doubt improved massively as a result of that. Maybe upgrading the things that need it, rather than adding stuff that is ultimately pointless (Twitter style tagging, for example, while handy in very rare occasions isn't all that useful), would be a better use of everyone's time and make much more sense to boot.

Also, yeah, yeah, I know, RFS forum blahblahblah. It was suggested already, but I get the feeling if I posted about it there, it'd just get ignored because, um, I don't quite think whining about something that seems to only bother me is a particularly good use of that forum. Also, I'm not suggesting some new forum or whatever so I imagine it doesn't belong there anyway.

...Also I did half-size it to be more managable and fit the arbitrary restrictions but it looked messy and silly so I didn't bother saving it. Instead, I chose to whine to an invisible audience and just get the venting out of my system. In full. The alternative I came up with was to split the image into two, so as to get both into the height limit both the issue I have there is that'd probably trigger the even more arbitrary "weight" limit (something which I've seen on literally no other site ever. Character limits, sure, "weight"?" Nope).