I am not a huge smilie guy…I do like to occasionally use them to accentuate a post, and I realize that this board is more cerebral than most out there…but can’t we get more and better smilies? We have a grand total of 13, and they all look like they are from 2004. There are some really good ones out there.
As an example, a Bengals messageboard that I help run has by comparison a metric shit ton of smilies, and many of them are absolutely hilarious.
Since they are both v-bulletin boards, I am going to try some of the emoticon codes to see if they work, but they probably won’t as the Bengals board is running a newer version I suspect.
:drinks:
:2dedhorse:
:locomotive:
Anyway, even if they don’t work…can’t we get some more/better ones? Please?
I like the lean-mean look of this board. Fun is for flakes. Bah. Humbug.
Here’s my criteria: emoticons that advance the fight against ignorance should be encouraged. Ones that don’t should not be offered. The proper testing ground for this is the Giraffe board. Generally speaking, preferred emoticons have at least the potential to be softeners, as opposed to aiding obnoxiousness.
Facepalm might be considered: it’s an improvement over embarrassed.
I like the lean look of this board too, although I confess I sometimes think “lean” is equivalent to “cheap” in some respects. This board software is capable of so much more than we get, especially someone like me that pays for a membership. I get the antagonism WRT sigs and avatars, but emoticons are different. And I don’t believe it would cost the powers that be much if anything to implement them. The ones we have now are pretty fucking lame, and again, I know this is a board that values the written word, good spelling and grammar, etc but I don’t see how expanded emoticons would inhibit that. The Tards get banned regardless.
TPTB had not one but two emoticon contests some time back. This resulted in the addition of Mr. Smacky and Mr. Dubious. I was the co-author of the latter, along with the more talented t-shirts who provided the basic design. IIRC t-shirts also designed smackie. We used the approval voting method.
The ninja and pirate emoticons, though diverting, really add very little in my view. They are merely cutesy. Same for most emoticons. But not all. A few truly assist with the fight against ignorance, insofar as the written word can seem overly harsh at times. Softeners can be a good thing. Then again, I used to think that yuk would be used in a purely antagonistic way, but I’ve seen it used non-obnoxiously. No, I don’t have any examples. I’m narrowly opposing yukky for the moment.
I couldn’t access the emoticons at http://site.go-bengals.com/
At any rate, we should approve emoticons only after a long and painful drawn-out process. One at a time. That’s the way we roll here. (It was actually sort of fun way back.)
I would like to see a greater selection of emoticons, but rather carefully chosen ones.
I’d like to see a “heart” one, and possibly a “heart” with a slash through it. ISTM I saw a thread suggesting these a while back, and they were shot down for some reason.
I definitely DON’T want to see animated smilies, and I’m of the impression that a vast majority of posters here agree with that.
I have this fantasy that I’m going to write a PHP script or JavaScript that will take plain text and convert it to a smilie cryptogram. If you beg nicely, maybe I’ll write another script to decrypt the same. Then I’d post occasional crypto-smilie messages over in the Game Room just for fun. For this, we need to have 26 smilies to use.
First off, there is an absolutely 0.00000% chance of new smilies being added, so please don’t take anything I’m about to say as anything other than a theoretical discussion. But yes, there are several smilies the SDMB desperately needs. The big two are :science: and :sciencefail:. Nothing conveys “look, helpful information!” and “oy, I suck” better than these two guys. We could also use haw, a nice self-deprecating softener, and fist, which is just plain useful, but the science twins are the big two.
Also, in the same vein that the SDMB could make way more money selling 24 hour suspensions of other posters than peddling their low-rent malware-infested ads, they could also make an absolute mint letting people bid to add or kill smilies. We did it a few months back and raised a few thousand dollars for charity, just letting people fight over whether some crazy smiley stayed or got axed. Given the fact that the posters here are both numerous and belligerent, it would be a goldmine. Plus, super entertaining. (Here is where I’d put a :science: smiley if we had one.)
Words could be used for even MORE condescension than :smack: or :dubious:! (It’s also useful for <snip> like it you want to quote a long post to agree with it, but don’t want to display the whole text because you’re not doing a point by point rebuttal).
I have to admit, I’m really fond of the suicide smiley, but it wouldn’t fit in the board culture here at all and would probably be used primarily by people getting in pissing matches in GD (“You like Romney? :suicide:”)
We’ve had smiley contests in the past and could well have another one in the future.
It’s still early in the Sun-Times Media assimilation and we’re sort of in a holding pattern right now … but once we get a better idea of what’s happening we could probably do another contest, sure.
They do have to be your own work and not swiped from another site, though.
We’ll let you know when it’s a good time to do this.
