I never change my preferences but half the time I don’t get the little smilie options normally displayed to the left of the message box. I also notice that when I’m forced into the nearly unbearably tedious task of encoding a given smilie in ASCII, it never shows up as a graphic in preview (or post) but I do get the smilie board after previewing. What gives?
The “smiley window” you speak of is only present if you click the Reply or Quote buttons, or after you preview. It is not present on the quick reply box. As for the smilies not showing up, make sure the box Disable Smilies is unchecked before previewing and posting.
Aha. So the smilies don’t auto-convert from ASCII in the quick reply box either? Because I’ve never checked/unchecked that box. Let’s test:
Oh, I see. I used a capital “P,”