Experts Round Table Network

Question: Should smilies be removed?

I like smilies, and I think the collection we have are a lot of fun... BUT...

That add overhead to the system, and many don't think they look very professional.  So in keeping with the professional neature of the site.  I think they need to go.

That is not a proposal, that is a question, you even say so  :)




Now, that is a proposal, you do propose, and motivate the reason for your proposal
 =D>

=========

I think even in a professional environment, having something fun does not hurt; of course if the overload means more expenses, and the risk of not being able to stay online, the choice is obligatory.
I would take out the "silly ones", this could be an ammendement, but for the sake of the consultation I won't ask for you to do so, and let it be a plain "yes they go", "no they stay"

I think they detract.

Maybe if the smilies were all K.I.S.A. (Knights In Shining Armour) rather than the smileys.

I'm not fond of them either.  I'm too used to using my old standby ;-)

remove smilies. I use =o) instead too

personally I kind of like them, though I would not use all of them, and for tech stuff I guess they really are unnecessary. The reason I'd get rid of them is they make everyone's posts the same. For instance, CM's smileys are different than the ones I usually use -- it gives everyone some personality to type them out in ascii.

Now, before I miss my chance to use this one:
 :violent3:

-Matt

I wouldn't mind a basic set of them <static>, but find myself typing them out, half the time anyway. So it's not like I would miss them.

 ](*,)

Smileys don't look all that professional, and we don't need any more images than necessary.

One can use emoticons just as well:-)

Indeed, I especially like:

%-|

Check out http://www.netlingo.com/smiley.cfm for all your needs.

I suggest we keep a list of the top 10 (or so) smilies and use very sober graphics.

What prevents a user from doing this...

:D  :)  :(  :o  :lol:  8)  :?  :shock:  :mad:  :P  :oops:  :cry:  :wink:  :roll:  :twisted:  :evil:  :!:  :?:  :idea:  :arrow:

and making the post unsightly? People will abuse the smilies, if I was someone looking for an asnwer to a tech question, I would not want to have all these smilies cluttering up a post and distracting me from finding my solution.

I agree -- much as I love toying with them myself sometimes, it would drive me bugsh*t to have to look at stuff like that all the time.

C_M,

If you run into someone idiotic enough to post 25 smilies in a row, he is going to give us more problems than just his love for smilies.

Most of the smily usage in forums is limited to: here! I'm making a fun remark!  :)

Which I think will blend perfectly with the site if we reduce the loudness of the yellow images (and not have them animated).

Also, smilies are an important aspect of the technical discussion.

Sometimes, the only way to tell a newbie that his site utterly sucks is by ending the phrase with a a happy face.

**
Listen webdev16n00b, if you came to my office with that website, I would pay you to go away :)

Yeah, a basic set would be nice

Ahha... Lobo is going shoot me :) I have been against his suggestion in all the threads I posted today.

NO smiles. Just basic Smilely(TEXT) like : ) : D : P are good itself. Just plain and clear. Tech discussion should be kept straight forward.

There would be many cases when people want to copy the code to editor, word and smileys would be there as image(graphics) and may create inconvinece(spelling!)

PS. Are we going to have spell checker?? There should be thread for that. I would do anything for that. It will save so much pain for me, cause I usually write things in MSWord and spell check and post it. ( I have not done for this post)

Also, while writing in SQL there would be problem.

SELECT Count ( * ) would be
SELECT count(star) << This example is for yahoo msgr. I could not find any case for our smiley set.

javascript:open.window('index.html');
echo chr(10);

:o and 0) would become smilies O.O, but we option to disabled, but ASCII is much better.

Yes we will be having a spellchecker, PHP dev group has looked into using PHP spellcheck functions, which will likely be used.