A: There are two main reasons why you may see "message truncated." The first reason is that your message or signature is too long. We recommend that you delete some images or try taking out extra words or sentences you don't need. This usually helps.

You may also end up with a "truncated message" if you have a short siggy. Why? Because you probably have a lot of extra ("junky") HTML in your siggy. Junk HTML is extra characters taking up space in your sig. Here's an example, gurlmod_erin always uses:

Whether you copy and paste or use HTML you'll need to make sure that your HTML code remains under a certain character count, otherwise, you'll get the dreaded "message truncated" message. For example, a simple sig of mine would be (in HTML):

‹br› ‹font name="verdana"›Erin‹br› Community Moderator‹br› gURL.com‹/font›

Which would look like:

Erin
Community Moderator
gURL.com

Sometimes, you get extra characters if you copy and paste or use an HTML program. That simple sig above could become:

‹p›‹font name="verdana"›Erin‹/font›‹br› ‹font name="verdana"›Community Moderator‹/font›‹br› ‹font name="verdana">gURL.com‹/font›‹br›‹/p›

Which would look like:

Erin
Community Moderator
gURL.com

It looks the same, however, do you see all the extra characters? The more "extra" I have, the higher the chance I have of seeing the "message truncated" error. Try deleting your extra characters--that just may do the trick.

If you are still encountering problems after following the above instructions, go into my board settings. Once in my board settings, go to personal signature. Click on source. Right click in box and choose select all. Then, delete. Scroll down and click on submit. Now scroll back down to personal signature and start fresh.

 
Q: Every time I try to put up an image, I just get a blank box with a red X in the corner. What is going on?

A: When an image appears like this, it means the image is broken. Images that appear with an X in the corner (or with a circle/triangle/rectangle in a couple of colors) are usually broken because of two different reasons.

First, you might have copied and pasted the image or file from a site and the site has moved the image, changed the name of the image or you may have just inputted the wrong URL (or link to the image). To solve this problem (or prevent it from happening in the future), download (or save) the image to your computer and upload it to your own site (like photobucket.com).

The second reason why you may experience a broken image is because you are trying to link directly from your own computer. For example, the image is only located on your desktop or in your personal documents. If this is occurring, upload the image to a hosting site (like Photobucket). Then try linking.

 
Q: Why do my images go across the page instead of going up and down?

A: What you're experiencing a run-on sig. Luckily, this is an easy error to fix. Simply put a break tag (< br >) after an image or text, where you would like to stop the line. Now, when you put more pics on your sig, they will begin on the next line. (If this answer doesn't make sense to you, check out the gURL guide to HTML. It might help.)

 
Q: I am using Firefox (or some other non-internet explorer web browser) and my board settings look a lot different from what you describe.

A: The WYSIWYG option only works for Internet Explorer based browsers. Any user using a browser other than an IE, like Firefox, Netscape or Safari, needs to use the "source" option to create her signature. You can check out the "Getting More Advanced" section of this guide for advice on how to create a signature in source.