Clickable smilies Options

[Peter Evans]

Mankind (or if you prefer humankind) managed to communicate without smilies for centuries. Millennia, even. Now, perhaps a lot of people think they're cute, perhaps a lot more people think that they need to have them because the precise nuances of their comments might otherwise be misunderstood, and gawsh, people are so sensitive, y'know?

I found smilies interesting for a period of about five minutes perhaps five years ago. But now, I'm sick of them. Just about every bloody forum I go to has them. (Lean, mean old htmlhelp.com/bbs/ is a refreshing exception.)

It's just byte-wasting crapola, really. No smilies, please.

[Peter Evans]

Yes, smilies suck.

Consider this thread. I am here going to have to refer to lowercase letters of the alphabet as "ay" and "bee" (even though I actually wrote "a" and "b"). I wrote:

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and (bee) flamebait, etc.

Preview showed me

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and ([some stupid smiley]) flamebait, etc.

I noted that "emoticons" were enabled (funny, I thought I'd disabled the **beep** [thank you, nannyware] things in my profile). I disabled them, and re-previewed

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and (bee) flamebait, etc.

Now I read:

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (a) messages such as mine and ((IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) flamebait, etc.

Ugh.

Can't smilies be completely disabled? I don't want autoconversion into smilies. I don't want smilies. I don't want autoconversion out of smilies to ugly text. All I want is intelligent text on web-related issues, not *beep* equivalents of winks and nudges and the mess they cause.

[Liam Quinn]

Yes, smilies suck.

Consider this thread. I am here going to have to refer to lowercase letters of the alphabet as "ay" and "bee" (even though I actually wrote "a" and "b"). I wrote:

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and (bee) flamebait, etc.

Preview showed me

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and ([some stupid smiley]) flamebait, etc.

I noted that "emoticons" were enabled (funny, I thought I'd disabled the **beep** [thank you, nannyware] things in my profile). I disabled them, and re-previewed

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (ay) messages such as mine and (bee) flamebait, etc.

Now I read:

I wonder whether it might be necessary to distinguish between (a) messages such as mine and ((IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) flamebait, etc.

When composing a message, there is a Post Options section with an "Enable emoticons?" checkbox. If you uncheck that, then you should be able to type stuff like (b) with no worries.