You can't.

The sig updater removes any img tags.

You can't, you used to be able to, but not anymore.

When the move was made from the old forums to the new ones those who had pictures on their sigs before the move still had them, until they changed them.

Here is mine

Images in sigs may be restored when we have time at some future point (though perhaps only for GDNet+ members who already have free reign with avatars).

The main problem was that people abused images in their signature with huge or animated (or huge *and* animated) images. These where often the same people who posted 5 word responses and didn't understand why they where being asked to reduce their signature size. Frankly this is *not* a kiddie board, we prefer content over page tall signatures and huge amounts of useless triva beside each post as seen on some php* boards. (you know things are wrong when you have to go searching the screen for the actual one line message posted)

Some people have suggested magical signature readers to determine image size and properties, but that's just not really practical (besides basic logistics, there is the matter of image servers that could changed the result based on who requests them, so that the GDNet server always gets a small non-animated version and thinks it's alright).

One method we might use (perhaps people would like to give feedback in this thread) is to require image tags to have hardcoded width and height values in thr tag. This makes things a little harder (you need to manually check the size of the image you want to use, and you can't dynamically change it as easily), but it would let us at least take care of the oversized signature problem (animated signatures would still be a concern).

Isnt it the image hosting servers who have to deal with the bandwidth usage? Or does GDnet cache the images or something?

It's not storage size and bandwidth, it's *screen size*. As stated, this is not a kiddie board, we don't like seeing screen high eye sore signatures of animated dragon ball z characters all for a post that's probably only 1 line. At the moment we do send warnings to people who create signatures that are too large (screenwise), however they are few because of the fact that they only have text to work with.

Again that runs into the ultimately unwinnable attempt to determine details about an image. Getting the image size requires getting the file (same problem as above), and checking extensions for "JPG" isn't very helpful either (servers can report images as GIF even if the extension says JPG, and Mozilla/Firefox treat all images as one type and then examine the file header to determine the exact decoder anyway)