The motion on the screen is distracting and annoying.
Foie, I can’t access any suggested smileys from your link.
John DiFool, you’re suggesting the non-animated one and linking the animated one. 
I would think that one would inevitably run up against the no insults rule. Kinda like the old Wally smiley.
Irishman: I blundered. I think you have to register to be a member and put up a reply to a post to see them, like you do here. Apologies. I’m not sure how or if I can link to the smilies…
Yes, a thousand times yes. There are many entertaining emoticons, but such objects make poor tools for communication. Animation is distracting.
What does 
mean? What emotion does it convey? I can’t tell from the emoticon.
Giraffe: With respect, though :Science: is popular at your board, I haven’t found it especially helpful. It comes off as bragging. Do people really skim threads for that image? (Rhetorical question.) To be fair, I don’t hang out at Giraffeboard too often though. Oddly, 
is a decent softener, as it’s a self-mocking sort of anger that is expressed.
I’m kind of hoping that :Haw: wouldn’t be expressed too often here. Yes I am a snob: that wasn’t obvious? 
While we’re on the subject, another big grin might be nice.
An alternative to :He’s Crazy: is :tinfoil: The problem with both is that they are basically insults, not softeners.
there is a Giraffe board?
Sort of.
I’ve already converted! How about you? accusatory point
Animated icons are just obnoxious. People post rows and rows of them making walls of blinking visual noise.
By the “Picard facepalm” I assume you mean the giant image macro. Again, perhaps amusing if you’re browsing some kind of internet chat board, but the SDMB tries to be a bit more mature than that, both in content and appearance…
LOVE this! But yeah, even if the staff here were to bring on additional emoticons, which they aren’t, this one would sadly never happen.
Also, I’d be a fan of adding the ones Giraffe proposed with the addition of :leafy:
Okay, I was somewhat kidding about leafy (although I honestly do like that one because I’m a child, but in fantasy land where the SDMB staff would entertain the idea of adding new emoticons, I don’t see one as pointless as that being added), but :toot: would be a nice addition to the board.
Would you elaborate on this association?
is it a secret?
Just google giraffe boards Jackie. Lots of people post both here and there. Giraffe also runs ads here.
The previous owner of The Straight Dope (Creative Loafing) sold the column and associated assets (i.e. the webpage) along with the alternative newspaper in which it resides (The Chicago Reader). The Sun-Times Media bought the whole shebang, so they are the new owners. It’s been discussed in ATMB previously.
(Insert obligatory joke about our new Sun-Times overlords.)
The site linked to in the OP is a perfect example of why we don’t have avatars and pictures here. Look at this page for example.
One guy making one line posts followed by his huge ass signature involving Calvin peeing, a big color picture, a bunch of stupid quotes and a smiley. If you actually want to read his posts, you have to scroll by his monster signature every time to get to another one line post. The ratio of content to wasted space there is about 1:30.
People actually like that shit?
That one looks like he’s giving me the finger.
I agree, I’m not sure what that is supposed to convey, unless it’s an alternative to :D, but with poorer art.
Do we really want an emoticon to express MORE condescension?
I doubt this would be allowed. By board policy, you are allowed to mark deleted text in quotes with “snip” or “…” or even “deleted”, but you are not allowed to make commentary on the deleted text within the quote box. Like this:
We had a similar case here recently.
I wouldn’t mind a better embarrased emoticon, and a better “sticking tongue out” emoticon. You know, an emoticon that actually sticks out the tongue, rather than a giggle face.
I’m not sure what facepalm looks like.
From the OP:
It has nothing to do with versions. Every vBulletin board has, out of the box, a handful of default smileys, and that’s mostly what we have here. In addition, in any version of vBulletin, the administrators can relatively easily add any custom smileys they want, with any image and any code to produce them. They can even replace the default smileys with their own versions. This is how we got dubious and smacky, and how we once had putz and the Jewish guy. If they really wanted to, the admins could change the good old-fashioned colon-and-end-parenthesis into a 1024x768 animated gif. Except, of course, that they’re not insane.
I’m not sure either. I wouldn’t use it like :D, I think it’s more like “whelp!”
I was joking, but also pointing out a flaw in having it. I don’t really want condescension.
Nah, words is content neutral (unless you consider “a lot of text” non-neutral). On the SA board I mostly use it to mean “you posted a lot of stuff but I want to reply to the general sentiment”, other people use it when quoting things like unmarked spoilers in a thread where spoilers are supposed to be marked. Despite being able to be used for condescension, it really is at hard a <snip> smiley in general use.
ETA: THIS is the insulting one: :downswords:
I’m also fond of iiam (it’s a mystery!)
Good grief. The internet was a pretty plain baby, but it grew up proper ugly.
No, but I don’t think that board is much like this one. Take this typical Something Awful thread, which in my personal opinion is quite similar to us – albeit a bit more vulgar and prickly. I think if you swapped all the moving avatars with still pictures (which is only really a tiny annoyance, only pokecapn’s is the least bit obnoxious IMO and that may be the bad art more than anything), it’s not bad at all – and in fact looks really nice. Note how the smileys in the thread are used to punctuate and augment statements, not spammed – just like they’re used here.
That’s a pretty typical SA thread, and I think if the Dope enabled Avatars and more smileys (and that page isn’t a great example, but pictures) it’d become a lot more like that than the Bengals example.
ETA: Here’s a thread with a picture embedded too: thread
