Make this site more dial-up friendly...

[Stallowned]

So I'm on vacation right now with a dial-up connection, and I can only read 1 out of 10 threads because I don't have the patience to stare at the monitor for 5 minutes for everything to load.

Something needs to be done, I don't know how many dial up users come to this site regularly, but It is probably a pain for them too, and for some new users probably makes them go to another site.

There needs to be stricter avatar and signature size restrictions.
There should also be a rule that all pictures posted are in thumbnails, not only will it be faster to load for all users, and most of the time most pictures posted suck and you get the idea just from reading the text in the post and if you really want to see the picture it is just a click away.

Please do somehting before this laptop goes airborne

[Madduck]

hehehe *** Stallowned !! ***

Take your vacation and laptiop and go play Solitatre !

Only joking mate the envious green tinge in my eyes should give that away

[Rockshmo]

Pretty big sig you got there yourself Stallowned.

That is a good idea though, it may not seem like it but there are plenty of dial-up users who are still gaming regardless of their shitty connection.

[Ryoko]

I really thought there was a way to turn off IMG tags, but it appears that only affects your posts, which is almost completely useless.

[Zhen]

Well, if you're using a browser with tabbing, you can let pages load in the background while you read a page that's already open. For the time being.

[stimmedcow]

Aside from the specific topic at hand, I agree of the whole site change. I am coming from a huge forum that does not allow images/html in sigs, avatars, and perfers if people use image thumbnails or at least warn of pictures in posts for 56k, I'd like to see changes too.

Staring at the huge image sigs is definitly a turn off when trying to read a thread, especially in longer threads where the same people are posting.

Rather than change the entire site though, what would be probabally more friendly is taking the "Topic review" code, making it so it displays sequential, and provide that via a seperate link in a collumn on the thread listing page. I think everyone would be happy

The only other thinng would be to require tags in threads that have a lot of images that are not thumbnails. [Big Pictures] [56k No Way], etc... just as a "courtesy" measure.

I'd also like a way to use the "small" html tag or some bb equivilant so text in sig can look nice and neat rather than regular text. That way, people that have lots of text in sig can make it smaller if they want.

[Hacken]

I think just having the option to turn off displaying avatars and signatures would just leave the text thereby making the forum more 'dial-up friendly'. It would also drawn less attention when reading forums at work. Besides, some of the signature graphics are just too large and gawdy.

[Bakemaster]

This can't be easily done with phpbb software. It can, however, be easily done by telling your internet browser not to display any images.