There might be a way to free up some space on the SDMB server and perhaps speed things up a little, but it would involve a little sacrifice from the Teeming Millions.
What are your thoughts on the possible elimination of the “Signature” option? You would still be able to add a personal “siggy” at the bottom of your message, but it would have to be typed in each time.
Won’t the people who want to use a sig still use it whether the automatic option is there or not? Or is removing the option the thing that will speed things up?
As far as I understand, the sigs drain resources since the server has to look in the poster’s records to find his sig each time someone opens a thread with a sig in it. Add 50 sigs in a page of a thread, and you’re looking up 51 files instead of just one.
I say, go ahead and scrap it. Just having people copy/paste their sigs into a post if they still want to use them isn’t a huge effort on an individual basis, and it seems to me it’d probably make quite an improvement.
Why does the server have to look up a person’s sig file? Couldn’t we just have the text of the sig file placed into the thread file whenever a post is added?
Like FairyChatMom, I rarely attach mine anyway. I wouldn’t miss the feature, particularly if it speeds up the boards. I’m perfectly capable of appending my own (allegedly) witty epigrams by hand.