Smilies and images in sigs

I guess it's doable. However, with the current implementation, it will mean adding two new fields to the user table. Perhaps we should get a second opinion on this.

I can see why you would want to disable images in signatures since that can be quite annoying, but smilies aren't that bad, are they? :)

Hohoho

Why not allow a 0,1,2 or 3 on the existing field? You'd keep compatibility with all existing installs.

... make that accept 0,1,2,3,4,5,6... we've still got one full byte to fill, c'mon!

I must say, though, that what CodeDuck says makes sense: either you want to see imaged smilies or not, but why would you want others not to see yours, and still have to take other people's?

BTW, *I* like image smilies

<lol> yeah, what I meant is exactly that. It's called flags. With one byte you can have up to 8 independent boolean values. 0,1,2,3 means the first two values, if we add another possibility, we jump to 8, etc...

That's the reason why I always wonder why mysql developers use bytes as the unit for integers, instead of bits. I guess a one for all is much easier to implement, otherwise it'd be just too much work just to avoid me being confused

Well, anyway it was just an idea, in order to leave you with one less excuse

It's all different points of view, but the result is the same, and you can use 7 extra bits on almost every TINYINT(1) that you have.

Now, we must only find added functionality to give them

Whoops, I forgot about this topic. Time to revisit it.

There's a very good reason, readability. Changing the value of a column from 0 to 1 to enable an option usually makes more sense than updating an "options" column from 0x98 to 0xB8 (or something). The only downside of multiple one-byte-columns is the extra space they will occupy. The speed of queries towards the table will hardly be affected unless we're talking about a lot of columns. Using one column and a number of numeric constants to check against is more space effecient, but it's also more "hackish".

Anyway, back on topic. My thoughts are these.

I agree that it's probably a good idea to remove the option "Convert smilies to images by default" and the per-post option "Show smilies as icons" in favor of a per-user setting for showing/hiding smilies all together. If you don't want to see other peoples smilies, you probably don't want to use them yourself either. Could someone propose a series of settings for the user profile to control these aspects? I get confused :D

Something we haven't discussed here is that I want there to be an option or a series of options that prevent PunBB from displaying any images at all. As it is today, if you disable "Show images" and "Show avatars", PunBB will not spit out one single image. No avatars, no [img]'s, no smilies and no "new posts indicators" in index.php and viewforum.php. I want to keep that functionality.

Only one small idea : Disabling totaly smilies for one post could be usefull, if posting something who include a smiley, "variable:PCHar;" or other text it could be usefull to diable totaly smilies.

Like a good reader, I started in the other thread and it said read this one first.....and then came across this. If you need a visual on this, let me know- I use 8 and 16 bit binary for settings (16 values for one integer field)- encode to integer for storage, decode to binary for checks and forms...works great...

Think of zero as 00000000 and 255 as 11111111 - each binary works as a flag. throw in an array an good to go.