Sig Images?
 

Why are/were they disabled?

They eat bandwidth. Not to mention that they eat up screen real estate and detract from the actual thread, and it just adds to more images a 56k user needs to download making pages load slower.

cant you turn "view member signatures" off?

Sure you could, but mostly because they are annoying, and this is Halx's baby.. so those are the rules!
:)

I like signatures. They let you convey interesting things about yourself. I dont want to turn them off because a few people post 1600x1200 jpgs in them.

Surely it's not a life threatening instance if you can't tag your neato photoshopped bit of machoness to every post.

The fact that there are no images allowed in the sigs is one of the things I like about this place. It makes for a cleaner page and keeps all of the clutter out. If you need to express yourself visually, take advantage of the avatar feature.

On other boards, I see signature with pics detracting from the quality of the board, and taking up space as was mentioned. People on other boards (although I think the level of maturity here is above this) psot pictures in sigs for the sole purpose of antagonizing other members. I agree with Wile E that the avatar is sufficient to express one's self artistically.

What this forum I visit do is they put limits on the size both in kb and height*lenght
It's like 21kb and 500*160

Sure it's harder for the mods but that's the way they do it and it seems to work...

I like the text-only signatures. I think what someone has in their sig now tells more about that person than a picture would. It also helps the pages load faster, and is another thing the mods and admins don't have to deal with. If you have a picture you really want to share, put it up on a post, or stick a link in like imemine.

i also like sigs... they're funny!

With the advent of signature images, there would also come the people who find it necessary to "one up" the other users (AKA adding a 2mb 150 frame animated gif to their sig)

Not only does that lag computers badly but its just ugly and unnecessary

Speaking as someone with a 28k connection, I have to say that I appreciate the lack of images in the signatures on this forum.