Jason Barnabe

When userstyles.org started, I had to keep in mind the various ways people could use the system in ways I hadn’t intended. People might create spam entries, use the site to host images, post things that aren’t CSS, etc. I wrote code to put restrictions on styles so that I wouldn’t have to deal with them.

Unfortunately, some of these restrictions have negative consequences for good intentioned style authors. For example, authors weren’t allowed to link to their home pages or a gallery of screenshots because of the restriction meant to prevent spam.

I’m going to start loosening these restrictions. As a first step, I’ve added the ability for styles to be up to 200KB (instead of 64KB). Authors who want really long styles can contact me and I’ll consider the requests on a case by case basis. The first style to be allowed the higher limit is Gmail Redesigned (by Globex Designs). Some of the criteria as to whether I’ll allow the higher limit:

• Is the style predominantly CSS as opposed to large data URI images?
• Could the style be modified to fit within the limit, such as by removing large comments?
• Is the style popular enough to make it worth it?

I’m going to remove some other restrictions for everyone (subject to some objective criteria like install counts). Some ideas I have:

• Link to any site rather than just those whitelisted.
• Larger (in code size and in display size) images.
• Add information such as home page and contact info to the user page.

Hopefully these changes will give legitimate authors more freedom while still stopping spammers and the like. If you have further ideas, please make your suggestion in this blog post or on the forum.

This entry was posted Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under userstyles.org. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.