Check Your Signatures!

I've noticed, for the past few weeks, the forums pages were loading a bit slow - so we did some sleuthing and here is what we discovered:Due to the state of the economy, etc, a lot of people/companies who used to offer "free" blinkies, tickers, etc are no longer in business and/or have decided to shut down the service. What this means is that a number of you have 'broken' images in your signatures and the site is still trying to access the images on servers that no longer exist. This creates an excessive load time for our users - and was one of the main concerns with allowing this feature on our site. We want to continue to offer the option of allowing tickers, images and other cool things to your signature - but we need the users to be proactive about making sure that they work and when they don't, we need them removed from the signature. If you use Firefox, you may not even know that you've got something broken in your signature - but IE makes it clear by leaving a broken "X" box in the place where the image should be.Please take a few minutes to double check to make sure your signatures are 'clean'. Site performance is important to us (as well as our users).Thanks for your attention to this really important matter! I'd really hate to have to make the decision to turn off the feature - but that is the next step :(