There should be a way to put real smiles instead of :). That would be cool.

Nooooo! Those are real internet smiles, not those stupid yellow gifs.

Now that I think about, the :) are better. I've just been used to seeing them on another forum.

give us an example...

I still prefer the old emoticon's.. or else they can (_x_)!!

I kinda partial to the chat icons in the gmail chat client :(|) for the simple reason that their simple

NateDawg, I agree completely. I recently created a chat page just to try out using some AJAX techniques, and used the Google smileys since they were more interesting than text, but less distracting than full-blown smiley icons.

I'm somewhat undecided on this myself. I had this feature available, and for reference just turned it back on for some minutes now. For now, I prefer plain text...

I like to use end bracket as an emoticon (like this ;), and those gifs break this. And my favourite emoticon is ;] and it always look wrong as gif, or there aren't such gif and it is the only text emoticon among graphic emoticons, and it looks silly than.

philipp, you ruined my "monkey" icon example http://mail.google.com/mail/help/images/screenshots/chat/monkey.gif when you turned on the emotions :D lol

Just trying this out:
:-) :-(:) :(:-> :p :D <3

:-)

;-(

more http request to do...

(:(-) ²

At least their not yellow, or moving ;-)

:P

Doesn't work, grrrrrrrr :-(

:) :(;) :P

I prefer plain text. The main reason being that the smileys sometimes appear when you don't want them to just because of your bracket/punctuation combinations.

I think a more valuable formatting feature would be to show quotes in different colours / styles by using <quote> / </quote> or [quote] / [/quote] or even << >> tags as markup.

;-)

:-> ;-> :-< ;-< :-/ :/

Tony is right, that is bad with smileys is that they appears always when you don't want...

plain text!!! : -)

Speaking about Forum... notification about new comments in a particular thread will be more than wanted. (Yeap, I know, I'm boring, but I waste to much time to click on each thread every couple hours...)

This thread will look funny when I turn off smileys again :D

no problem-- its will just be a minor cosmetic issue .. pls turn of the smilies!!