Just another friendly bump. Not that I’m impatient, I just didn’t want the thread to get buried and forgotten.
And a much-belated thanks to tshirts for converting my smilies to proper form. Thanks, tshirts!
OK Gang, Sorry to drag this back up, but before it gets put totally to bed, can I slip in one more?
I just had an inspiration tonight that I can’t let go unaddressed.
The last smilie I (intend to) submit is for those times when something which has been eluding you finally soaks in, and you feel like a bonehead.
It also will work for when you can’t make some dingleberry get your point.
I think there is a lot of potential use for this one.
See for yourself—>Bboy’s smilies…what again?
tshirts, Can you add your magic touch, and stick one more on the proposed smilies page…again? I haven’t learned microangelo yet. I got it, just haven’t installed it. I owe ya bigtime.
TubaDiva? are you still with us? 
Bboy, I like your new smilie (handie?), but I wonder how many people will use it to indicate something like, “don’t go there” instead of “OMG.” For the former meaning, you could call it the Stop, in the Name of Glove emoticon.
You got it. But don’t ask for more changes.
I’m done with smilies, and the board. I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks, and the only reason I came back is to post my initial smilie contribution, made 1 year ago today.
Like Samuel Beckett’s play/movies Waiting for Godot, waiting has its moments, and can be oddly invigorating for a while, but then it’s time to stop waiting and lower the curtain.
Not to sound ungrateful for all of y’alls efforts, but I hope you can appreciate that with our current speed issues, we’ll think twice before harrassing the tech guys with requests for extra smilies to be added. As it is, their main focus is to keep the message board up and running, and to prevent the server from exploding.
And while smilies are all neat and dandy, they’re just not as important as a message board that runs smoothly. It’s all a matter of priotities, I’m afraid.
Thanks for the response, Coldster.
Is there something we users can do to help? - aside from not using smilies that is…
What if you ask each SDMB member to kick in a buck or two?
How many thousands of us are there? A few thousand bucks would buy some bigger, faster hardware, right?
I’m sure many of us would be happy to contribute to the betterment of this fine board…especially if we all get our names included on some kind of ‘Friends of the SDMB’ page. eh? eh?
Wouldn’t that be cool?
Many users have already suggested that, try a search for it in ATMB. The short answer is: the Chicago Reader, as a for profit organisation, can’t accept donations. Also, there is such a thing as impartiality involved. People who donate might want to get a say in how the boards are run, and frankly, they would even have a point. I’m sure you can see why that wouldn’t be a desirable situation. Too many captains on one ship, and all that.
Using smilies isn’t a huge problem. As it is, they’re probably all in your Internet cache anyway, and aren’t adding to the server load when you open a page. Sigs, for example, ARE more of a problem, as the server has to check for them on every post that has the “show sig” box checked. The techs are tweaking the server whenever they can, and have been quite succesful over the past few weeks, in my experience. Let’s hope we’re on the way up - ideally, a new server would even be better, of course. But that’s up to the Reader to decide, not us.
I guess I already am doing my part then.
Keep up the good fight.
Bboy
Well, I’ve figured out only one smilie, the happy face [:)], but that’s internet standard.
How do I get all the rest of the smilies I’ve seen here?
Bob.
It’s buried in the fine print at the bottom of the page:
[sup]Smilies[/sup]