Welcome aboard.
My grade school days are too far behind me.
I normally just spell out “Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there.”
“LOL” is fine if you are actually, literally, laughing out loud and want to let your receiver know.
There will be websites popping up dedicated to protesting the usage.
^ ftw
I do the same thing - people misinterpret my tone in written communication, so if I suspect someone may not get that I’m joking, I sometimes toss in a smiley as a hint. Oddly, I only have to do this with a few people who consistently get the wrong message.
Use them all. I post on one board where they have a full page of vivid animated smilies and I’ll decorate a post with them just for fun.
And I LOL all day long.
Cuz that’s just how I roll.
LOL seems kind of insincere when I use it, so I use some sort of “Hahaha- heeheehee- Bwahahahaha!” thingee, along with smileys. I have a fun assortment of smileys that I use on other boards.
Never LOL and smilies only rarely when I’m afraid that my text might be misinterpreted since there are, obviously, no verbal cues in a text. I hate LOL but lately it seems it’s only the 45+ age croup that does it to show how “with-it” they are.
I voted dislike but it’s a pretty mild dislike.
What she said! Lol. : )
I never go to chat rooms anymore (are there chat rooms even around nowadays?), but back in the day, with tons of people in a room, a quick lol was often all a person would have time to type. But with boards? Why bother?
I thought the question was about text messaging, not message boards? I might have misunderstood.
I don’t use either in text messages, but I do sometimes use ‘heh heh’.
Heh heh.
My sarcasm seems to translate only about half the time in chats, so I’m not too stingy on winkys. I try to keep it to a huge minimum on this board though.
I never used LOL. I’ve always just typed ha (good one). HA! (clever!) or Hahahahhah (I’m really laughing over here), or some variation. But lately, I’ve been judiciously using “I actually LOL’d.”
Never liked smiley anythings.
You get someone saying, “You are an idiot dumbass!” and then insert a smiley?
Like that makes it OK?
Plus, I usually find people who overuse the smiley as someone who cannot otherwise communicate in the English language and feels it necessary to pull out preschool icons. It is only a matter of time until we revert to hieroglyphics and have nothing but smiley icons, fingers, toes, pictures of kittens and the occasional triangle or arrow.
I still use lol sometimes, but it depends on my audience. Most of the time I try to use something else, though. I use hehe/heh/ha/haha more often. And I say “kek” or “bur” in WoW, which is what lol looks like to the other faction.
I use smileys a lot. A whole lot. Not exclusively, but to accentuate my statements. It helps to illustrate intent, which text alone is not good at conveying (because I make ironic puns and joke around kind of a lot).
=)
:3
^^
^__^
D:
>:[
{=)
^,.,^
And kirby smiley faces are my favorite:
(b^^)b
t(--)z
(>^(>O_O)>
Sweet!
I’ve been using AIM / the Internet since I was a preteen (mid-90s). At the time, I’d use smilies and abbreviations a lot, since all the other kids did it and it was a cute quasi-insider slang. Also, since about 2/3s of my IM use was hopelessly flirting with girls, 
felt incredibly necessary.
When I hit sixteen-ish, smilies and other “Internet slang” started to feel more like the mark of a tech newbie and also started to be equated with godawful “text speak” (omg u r going 2 his party 2nite?? me 2!!) which I wanted no part of. So I dropped it altogether and started using the same grammar and style whenever I wrote, be it IM, message board, blog, or homework. On the plus side, this lead to me getting frequent positive feedback from teachers for having an engaging, conversational style without being overly casual. Yay me.
More recently, I’ve reverted to using smilies more since they’re fast and, at times, adding a wink or a smiley to something is simpler than rewording.
I still tend to avoid acronyms or other jargon, although I’ll occasionally pepper them in if I’m speaking to a heavy user of such. I’ve learned, over the years, that there’s something to be said for not having people think I’m condescending to them.
I was told by someone here on the board to use LOL.
That person actually has me tied up in their basement so I have to comply.
I prefer to be an optimist: I believe that smileys will continue to evolve to ever greater levels of complexity and be able to encompass more and more of our written communication. Then, it’s only a matter of time before we forgo the alphabet altogether and replace it with a Chinese-style system with a zillion pictograms. Of course, I’m not really sure if that’s an improvement…