Honestly, why dosen't GameSpot accept bitmap images? It would make banners and signatures easy to make so the lazy can just use Microsoft Paint to create these?
Bitmaps are uncompressed. The 36x36 user icon as a 24-bit bitmap would use up around 4 KB of space. A banner of 512x192 would use up 288 KB when saving it as a GIF, JPG (quality 85), or PNG (whichever is best for it) could reduce it to 25 KB. Plus, the bigger file size would mean a lot longer time needed to download, especially for dial-up users and would just strain the server from the excessive bandwidth usage.
Paint (at least with XP) can save as JPG, PNG, and, although not sure, GIF. Programs like GIMP or Photoshop do better than Paint does in terms of quality and file size.
Paint is not limited to the bitmap format. Bitmap is a format that takes up a lot of space, so it's not internet/bandwidth friendly and that's probably why Gamespot doesn't want you to use it. Just stick to something like .jpg and you will be fine.
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