New smilies

Greg Bernhardt

I've uploaded new smilies. I think they offer a much needed updated look :thumbs_up

Monique

I'll miss the others

Gokul43201

I miss the old ones already. And I'm a little daunted by the new ones...they're...well... big ??!!

Also, I think some of the old names are gone, so we will find many of the old posts lacking in actual graphic display.

chroot

I personally don't like them. They're too big to fit in line with text.

- Warren

Monique

Yeah, the others were much more expressive :sad:

Doc Al

I don't like them either. Do we really need stuff like: :pizza: :ip: :cat: :BeRightBa :boy: :camera: ?

The old smilies were closer to "emoticons" which are useful for adding a little "body language" to a verbal response. If you know what I mean.

BobG

I also liked the old ones better. They were more expressive and a limited number of options limited them to supplementing the words.

The slepl cchek is a good otpion, thuogh. :star:

cronxeh

I donno what this one actually means :secret:

plover

There are a few issues raised by the new smilies. Having no familiarity with guts of vBulletin, I have no idea whether they are more trouble to deal with than they are worth.

First, as it stands, thousands of posts will have unprocessed smiley tags as many smiley names are not duplicated in the new set. Casual readers of PF who are not familiar with vBulletin and even some PF habitués who have never taken time to learn the formatting system may find these confusing. This is probably the most relevant issue for the actual scientific parts of the site.

Second, in some contexts, the smilies are a significant reflection of the communicative intent of the author. My experience is that this is especially true in the politics forum, which is the arena where smilies most often function as snark modulation operators. Unprocessed smiley tags in these situations can distort the meaning of posts for those unfamiliar with the original images, especially for those smilies with ambiguous names, or those whose appearance carries a different range of connotations than the word that names them.

Also, in my opinion, new smiley images are never simply replacements for old ones. A different image has a different visual impact and connotation. In the context of electronic communications, where smilies have taken on the role of auxiliary language tokens, replacing an image is a bit like changing a word in a sentence with a word with the same base meaning from a different language, and runs the same risk of adding or subtracting meaning.

I hope all of this doesn't end up just sounding pompous and arcane; I do realize that most people probably treat the writing of posts from an entirely instrumental standpoint, and that these issues may seem trivial. However, I would still like to make a plea for archival integrity: that from a standpoint that takes writing as including all the tools of symbolic communication in a given medium, it matters that the original images accompanying so many posts have been changed or stripped.

None of this is to say that a new set of smilies would be a bad thing if they could be attached only to new posts (languages evolve, after all), but the meanings of the current generation of posts were generated with the previous set of images, and in my opinion, those images should remain attached.

I do however concur with the previous comments that this replacement set of images does not seem particularly good. In terms of the available meanings, the important slots covered by 'rolleyes' and 'tongue2' in the old set are absent. (And the 'tongue' image in this new set is just terrible, I mean really: [edit: new smiley image no longer available - yay!] -- it looks a guy with a triangle pasted on his cheek...) I would also avoid explicit Microsoft icons like [MSN butterfly, which isn't working], if for no other reason than that it will prevent posts complaining about them from taking up bandwidth...

Oh, and several of the smilies aren't working, e.g. there are a few different ones called 'messengerN' (for various N), but only one of them works. This appears to be because the working smiley does not require the trailing colon, so all smiley names starting with 'messenger' result in the same sequence being read.

Tom Mattson

That's it, from now on I'm exclusively using outsourced smilies.


http://www.wernergut.de/smilies/

http://deephousepage.com/smilies.htm

http://www.mysmilies.com

check

Yeah. Sorry Greg, these new ones suck.

Moonbear

Ack! At first blush, I liked the new smilies, until I started seeing how the names line up with the old ones. I started this post with one called "confused." It doesn't look confused to me, it looks like it swallowed a bug, and that's how I'd probably have used it. I like some of the new options, a thumbs up and thumbs down, the embarrassed one looks better for an apology (but is missing the trailing colon, as are many) than the old shy or blush ones. These look like the MSN smilies. They make more sense for chatting on messenger than trying to communicate more seriously.

I don't know what goes into selecting a smiley set, but is it possible to mix and match these and the old ones? Maybe pull out some that might only lead to mischief (like the batty one...I can just see that being misused in the political forum), and put back in some of the simple emoticons? This set doesn't seem to have as many of those, and I think they were more helpful.

Sorry guys, I like all the other new things you've been adding, and I know this is a lot of work...I'm really appreciative of your efforts, just don't really like this set much (we really need our biggrin and rofl smilies back too...I miss them already )

Moonbear

Thanks Tom! Now those are some cool smilies

Wait! Why aren't the image tags working now? That's supposed to be a smiley, not a link. Tom, did I forget to do something to make it work?

Tom Mattson

The img tags appear to be disabled in the Feedback Forum. If you notice, there's no icon for it at the top of the post window. They still work elsewhere, though.

Tom Mattson

Ack! It seems the img tags only work in General Discussion!

Greg Bernhardt

The old ones are back

Monique

I'm very happy, these are all colorful and cute