O.K. fellas, what happened to the smilies lately?

Did we abuse them ?

Will they ever be back?

They are still here....

Use the code listed and they will show up.
Skulldini see?

How do you know the code??

Xia, they're listed in the FAQ however if you look under the post a reply box, there is a clickable link that takes you to them directly.

This is all well and good, but it was so nice to have them sitting under my reply box. what can we do to get them back?

This is really a question for the tech people however, if you noticed, it takes a long time for each page to load when the smilies are present. We doing as much as we can to improve response time but reducing the number of unnecessary processes until we can get a better server.

Clickable smilies are nice and all, but with 180 of them, that's a bit much to show on one page. Plus, pages which show the smilies are shown pretty often - say, about one out of every three or four pages. I'll be looking at restoring the clickable smilies to a certain degree, but it'll have to wait until the new PM system is installed and the search routines are reworked.

The display of the smilies was certainly starting to hamper the page download times so I'm glad they've been removed for now.

However, I do think that smilies are an important part of Internet communication as they help to convey those elements of conversation that cannot be succinctly represented in textual form (unless you are an Internet guru and know all of the LOLs and ROFLs etc).

An alternative might be to have an "insert smilie" button which, when pressed, displays the list of smilies and inserts into the current text. Essentially, this would be very similar to the way in which the insertion of usernames works in the search facility. If this were achievable, would it also possible to cache the images such that re-display of such a pane would take less time than the original display?

Just some suggestions if they're worthwhile, otherwise find the nearest bin and drop them in.

That's what I've been thinking, Beetroot. I've got other things I'm working on at the moment though. For now, the clickable smilies have to take a back seat ...