How do you make the animated signatures? Are they GIFs? If they are GIFS, how do you make the GIFs? I know it's sort of a nooby question, I don't use GIFs much.

Try PMing Thunderbolta or Xzien as far as making them. They are GIFs though.

yes they are gifs, as swf and similar files are not supported by phpbb, at least not to my knowledge.

You would require a program such as Photoshop or GIMP, which has an animation bar that looks like this:


To use it, each frame in the bottom is one frame of the GIF, and the time below it (0 sec) is about how long it takes to go from one frame to the next. 0 seconds just makes it the smoothest, but you also need the most frames with the smallest variances in movement so it doesn't look too jumpy.

Each frame with a change requires a new layer where the change happens (in the above image, layer 1 would have the text at the bottom, layer 2 would essentially be a new "image" in the same canvas, and would have the text moving up a small amount, etc.)

This is the layer bar:


After all of this, you would have to select "Save for web and devices", and select "GIF".

I use GIMP. As Rigor said, each frame is a layer, and so each layer will be slightly different.
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

I downloaded GIMP already but I'm not sure on how to use it exactly... Even if I have multiple frames, I don't see the animation panel or whatever... Like where you choose what to do with the frame (e.g. move it down a pixel)...

I use flash. The controls are easiest to use as each layer has it's own little box at the top. You can easily make motion tweens with them.

As in Adobe Flash? Can you give the link to the specific download? I can't find any developer tools for Flash...

Unfortunately I had a friend install them for me so I don't know the process