Could we have symbols besides smilies? After all, as I recall from a Cecil book, the smiley was the intellectual property of someone who was ripped off without remuneration…
How about other symbols, e.g., that:
show excitement?
demonstrate sympathy?
evoke boredom?
convey laughter and mirth?
Where will you draw the line? If you get smilies because they’re fun or because “a lot of people like them”, what’s to stop us from accumulating a hundred smilies? A thousand smilies?
In addition to my previous reasons for vetoing another smiley addition, there’s also this:
The smilies that are suggested are chosen for poor reasons. Cute, funny, “because it reminds me of someone”, and simple liking are the reasons most frequently given for supporting a new smiley. Those factors, however, are not the most important considerations to weigh. Whether they are needed, how frequently they will be used, and how they will affect the boards should be given the greatest weight in the decision. Yet they’re not.
Also, given the lack of proper usage contexts, people will make up contexts and misuse and overuse the smiley. Take Smashie, for example. Remember the Pit threads that had posters posting just to say “Og SMASH!”? Smashie had clear use beyond that, and those Pit posts made that abundantly clear. Like most gags, “Og Smash” was funny the first time, but it was annoying the 25,539 times after that.
Finally, they suck bandwith. I am a night owl, but I’m starting to get sick of having to wait until 3am PST in order to have the board running at a decent speed. I don’t want another smiley clogging that up.
Let’s not mistake needing a new smiley with simply wanting one.
But I want one. I don’t need one.
Dear God. I thought the font color and size tags were enough to make me hemmorhage. Symbols? Is this a message board or an art gallery?
Sorry, this is bugging me big time. And when that happens, it means it’s time I called it a night. G’night.
On a more serious note, I think having different smileys at our disposal is a neat thing provided they’re not overused. If a limit per post is imposed, that’d ensure people don’t overuse them, no? So having more choices would become a moot point.
Don’t worry, Audrey, they’re not gonna have the full avatar thing. <S>
And, just For the Record, despite the best attempts of my Learned Colleague, Miss Persson, God and Truth and Justice won and Rolly lived!
Fenris
Relax.
Yes, smilies are added (very infrequently) because people “like them”. It could be argued that, based on what we have already, additional smilies will not serve any other purpose than the amusement of our membership. Of course, this implies that some members will be annoyed by the addition of a new smilie: hence the “No New Smilie” category in the polls. We’re trying to make it as democratic as possible, and if “No New Smilie” is the #1 selected option, then “No New Smilie” it is. Go forth and tell your friends. 
The impact on board performance isn’t all that big. Our current smilies are in the 200 to 400 bytes range, which to this relatively non-tech moderator means that one smilie will take a download time of less than .1 second with a 56K modem. Maybe I completely bollocksed the math there, but .4 kilobyte divided by 56 is really not all that much time, is it?
Furthermore, on default settings, most browsers keep often used images -such as smilies- in your cache file. In other words, the impact on the server and, hence, board performance, is even less than described above. I wouldn’t worry about that factor.
I meant something else besides jargonistic, cute-variations-on-a-dumb-theme-faces composed of circles with cartoon expressions.
A wider range of expressions than “I’m being funny”, “That bores me” and “SMACK! I shouda known that!”
Not XML tags. no, no, no.
;j :o 
:eek: 
:rolleyes: 
:smack:
How about this then - instead of getting a “new” smiley, why don’t we just trade one out? Like the blushing singer for instance. We pick a new one to replace it and the next time we have another poll the blushing singer can be a candidate?
LOL vanillagirl
Except that this time I plan on making sure that the winner is “swiss/neutral”.
Well, since Switzerland joined the UN now, I guess you can stick that “neutral” where the sun don’t smile, Milka boy.
Plus they have a bitchin’ knife.
I agree. This is why I will continue to campaign and vote for the “yuk” smilie. If those “TMI” threads are going to continue to lurk out there, we need it!
I was kind of sorry to see smackie win; I don’t think I’ve had a chance to use it yet. I did, however, kind of wish the “tinfoil hat” smilie was around the other day.
Had a good night’s sleep, and now my knickers aren’t so twisted.
I still don’t want to see a new smiley, though.
Points conceded, Coldfire. I know the bandwith argument is whipped out every time stuff like this comes up, but I had to include it. Back when I was on dialup and surfed the boards at a more sluggish hour, loading graphics would make things even worse for me. Folder icons and smilies would take 30 seconds to a minute to load. It wasn’t so much the size of the image, but I guess the server was so flooded with requests that when mine had to stand in line all over again, so to speak, it was a really long line.
I have DSL now, and I post when it’s fairly quiet, so I don’t wait more than 30 seconds for an entire thread to load. But I know not everyone else does, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
With regard to the poll that was promised for the end of the week: I have it on good authority that Smilie King mr Winkelried will be a bit sporadic on the boards over the next few weeks due to circumstances in his personal life. Don’t worry, it’s good news rather than bad, but don’t expect that poll to be up by Friday.
i propose a ::bow to you:: smiley… this smiley is not represented by the current set, and i can see that it won’t be jobless if inducted into the smilie workforce…
Yeah, let’s retire a smiley when we add a new one, keep smiley homeostasis.
I don’t have much use for the “cool shades” smiley meself.
Blushing smiley’s okay, but it need to scale the red down to just just pink cheeks.
Me, I like the “smiley sex” smiley I’ve seen elsewhere. I’m positive nobody here would abuse that one.
Don’t fear the knife, fear the corkscrew.
This would be technically too difficult, we couldn’t just turn off the old smiley. You would want to keep it enabled to properly display it in old threads, and there’s no built-in way in the board software to differentiate between smiley codes from ‘old’ and ‘new’ posts.
Once smileys are added, we have to stick to them, that’s why the choice of what to add should be a well-considered one. But if it is I’m all for it.