Can I fix it? My dad grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and told me how they used to castrate steer. 
Fenris - so your idea is that we should add any smiley that gets proposed by an SDMB member? I’m sorry, but
a) that will never fly, and
b) I would argue against that even if I were a strong smiley proponent (which I am not.)
I don’t like the idea of adding a smilie “for a while” and then getting rid of it. Then we are going to have endless questions in ATMB of the type “why do I see :foil: all over the place?” It makes old threads confusing.
You say “those that don’t like smilies don’t have to use them.” No, but they still have to see them, and the people that hate smilies with a passion might just quit posting. The crowd we have now, which is a pretty good crowd I think, obviously doesn’t require smilies to enjoy the SDMB.
If you think one in fifty is too small a chance, we can change the rules next time to say “maximum of ten submissions and one submission per poster.” That would encourage people to be more selective in their submissions.
A) I didn’t really think it would. But it was worth a try 
B) How 'bout any smiley that gets proposed and passes an initial screening?
GD&R
**
Except that there are a huge group of people who want to contribute a smilie. Even after whatshisname ran off with his 15 smilies or howvermany, you still didn’t (as far as I know) have a problem getting your fifty. I contributed about…what, 6? I don’t know how typical that was: can you approximate how many Dopers were in that pool of 50? Much of what I’m saying here is based on the idea that there were a lot of Dopers who only contributed one or two. Obviously, if my submission rate was typical, my argument’s shot to shit!! 
I agree that more selectivity in submissions might be better: perhaps a rule next time of one smilie submission per poster. Allow a fixed amount of time to submit a smilie (say…a week?) and then vote on a predetermined percentage of the smilies to get in (obviously the number would be low) with a minimum and a maximum amount. If you set 5% as the number that get in and you get 400 submissions, you’d still only let 5 in, if you only got 10 submissions, you’d still let one in.
:: shrug ::
I hope that this post and the previous one didn’t come off as too pissy: I’m glad that you’re letting more smilies in and I appreciate how much work this contest must be to run.
I’m not trying to joggle your elbow, just tossing out suggestions.
Fenris
Aw, come on. This is capitalism: the consumer rules. Smilie producers should just learn to adapt to the pitiless one-smilie-at-a-time market.
I say we introduce a smilie, see how he or she works out, and continue adding as appropriate. In short, the status quo.
I would also note that the poll maxed out at 50 rather late in the process, and I suspect that few Dopers had their submissions turned away.
Now if vBulletin allowed mini-pallettes for particular forums, that might be different…
Signed,
Flowbark, Chair
The Committee for Functional Smilies and Drawn Out Processes
;j
If it dies do we give it a proper burial or just flush it down the toilet?
I don’t get it…which smiley is the new one?
Arnold:
I fail to see why having a wider choice of them would increase the total deployment, although I suppose that it’s possible that it would.
Perhaps what we need is the corollary to “Disable smilies in this post”–a prefs setting that lets the user opt to not see them, and to see the raw ASCII codes for them instead.
I might agree with red dragon, depending on what they’re saying.
Perhaps a good first step would be to get rid of excess smileys and then replace them with more usable versions?
:rolleyes: :mad: :eek: seem to be the most used and most useful ones.
:wally would be kept too, for obvious reasons.
The blow up doll, :o, the smiley’s stupid friend, 
, and the inefficient 
all seem more useless than many of the submissions to the poll. Unless there is some hidden meaning behind ;j, it seems totally out of place.
Mr. can help the poster convey a genuinely quizzical stance, as opposed to a veiled attack.
So, eventually there are going to be 2,583 smileys to choose from? But just not now. We’ll wait as they trickle in once every few months. Can you at least have a “retire a smiley” vote every once in a while to cull the herd.
Make sure that one of the options in that poll is “remove all smileys.” That way there is a small chance I will one day be happy with the smileys available at Straight Dope.
But most times I’ve seen it used, it’s been used after quoting an entire post, so the poster has no idea which part of the offending post is causing quizzicality. A short sentence should show as superior.
For the record, my scary devil monastery days make me yearn for a total lack of smileys. They’re a crutch.
If only we could fight ignorance without UI…
Fuck fighting ignorance, I want the scary bloody homicidal clown!
There isn’t a new smiley yet; the voting is still going on to choose which one will be added.
OMG! Now I see that this is turning into a debate on the usefulness of smilies. To paraphrase andros, it is kind of amazing how such a “stupid issue” can generate this amount of debate. It reminds me of the moderator discussions on how many smilies to add.
I’ll check back in a month and see if there’s a consensus.
P.S. I hope I didn’t ruffle any feathers. I don’t mean that anyone interested in smilies is stupid. After all I’ve spent countless hours in the past month dealing with them. But when I first suggested to my colleagues “let’s add some smilies since we have periodic requests in ATMB”, little did I think that it would generate this amount of discussion / rancor / etc.
Yeah, but you’re a nicer guy than I, Arnold.
Vote? we get to vote? Where!
As long as you don’t mind. (here would be a good place for a dubious smiley)
I like Obfusciatrist’s idea about eliminating some smileys and agree with wikkit that :o ;j and are mostly useless. I can see the :woosh: and :smack: smilies completely taking over for and :o
I guess I just hate to see so many potentially useful smileys get eliminated because we’re only choosing one. Don’t get me wrong, a lot were stupid too.
I think there’s a bunch of polls in IMHO… at least, they were there last time I looked.
F_X