We have a good range of smileys, but it could be better. Here’s some I’d like to see in the table to the right of the post-box:
Horny smiley: Big eyes, tongue hanging out and drooling. Useful when discussing hottie celebrities in CS.
Nervous-grin smiley: Conveying the idea, “Well, at least total hell hasn’t broken loose yet!” or similar sentiments. Crooked, awkward smile, eyes rolled up, smiley surrounded by flying beads of sweat.
Unrestrained joy smiley: Not quite , not quite . Something conveying the mood of a Snoopy happy-dance.
Who, me? smiley: Smile of exaggerated innocence, eyes rolled up towards shining halo.
Fight-face smiley: Like :mad: but more so. A snarling, roaring expression you would expect to see on the face of a gung-ho soldier charging all berserkergangr into battle against an enemy he really, really hates.
Puking smiley: To express disgust. I’ve seen many requests for one in various threads.
Ee-eew smiley: Like the pukey, but less intense. Lips drawn back, nose wrinkled (well, maybe we can omit that – a smiley really shouldn’t have a nose).
Death to all Smileys Smiley: A huge looming black vortex of anti-smiley energy that whirls around the page eating all of the smileys in everyone else’s posts.
Sorry, smileys chap my ass.
Sure. Maybe we could have smilies that act as short-hand for all the board’s cliches. For instance, we could have a flaming canine smilie for “I burning your dog”. I’m not creative enough to know what they would look like, but we also need a 1920’s Style Death Ray smilie and a Hi, Opal smilie. But we might not be able to make a smilie out of “penis ensues”, because it could be too. . .adult in nature.
Evil-grin smiley: Conveys, “Oh, I am so going to enjoy this and you are so not! BWAH-HA-HAA!” Like , but with the eyes open and glaring. Maybe a different shape to the grin, more crescentlike.
Nothing to Pit here, but this is the forum for Board suggestions, right?
Anyway, what’s wrong with using words to convey emotions? We don’t need the smileys. If you absolutely need a smiley to indicate that your post was joking, or sarcastic, or sympathetic, or whatever, then 9 times out of 10 it means that you should probably work on expressing yourself better in a written format.
Agreed. I loathe the overuse of smileys, because it becomes a crutch to avoid clever writing. I don’t hate all uses. Sometimes a :rolleyes: or a :dubious: is just the thing to convey your meaning, or a or can deflect a potential Pit thread. It’s when smileys are used for no good reason, cluttering up a perfectly good thread with noise.
Then again, I think I may be extra sensitive lately, because I’ve been spending time on a writing board in which the use of animated smileys has reached critical mass.
People have a hard time already just trying to master the tools this board already provides, why should we clutter it up with more crap for people to misuse?
Look at it this way. When we post here, we’re not doing what you do when you write an article meant to be published in print for a non-participant audience that has no way of communicating its reaction back to you except by the dilatory process of letters-to-the-editor. That’s where you would really be under pressure to use “clever writing.” But the SDMB is more in the nature of a virtual recreation of a salon, a discussion club where everybody’s sitting around the coffeeshop table and there’s a lot of give-and-take back and forth. Only, in a real meatspace salon setting, you can use facial expressions and body language and intonation in addition to words as such. We can’t do that here – but we can make up at least some of the lack with smileys.
I would be in perfect agreement that we don’t need to go THERE! :eek:
We need a pirate smiley. Because pirates are cool.
I don’t mind 'em, I just mind people who overuse them. They’re nice as an occasional tool. But if ninety percent of your posts have smileys in them, you can burn in hell.
, not quite 
. Something conveying the mood of a Snoopy happy-dance.
a “so there” smiley?
can deflect a potential Pit thread. It’s when smileys are used for no good reason, cluttering up a perfectly good thread with noise.
Who has a “hard time” using the tools this board already provides?