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Suggestion: Can we have more emoticons please?

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And since I can't edit the above post, I'll add this as another post and the mods can merge the posts if they want to.

There seems to be an attitude by some here that using smilies is in some way unworthy of people who are interested in the written word. Not everyone interested in reading and discussing books is a highly talented writer (my husband is a PhD scientist who is an avid reader but not all that good a writer and also a very - um - creative speller). Even for those of us who are capable of stringing whole sentences together, smilies are a handy way of helping to get a message across. Sometimes the judicious use of a smilie can help a non-native English speaker convey an emotion that isn't coming across in the plain written word, and sometimes the use of a friendly smilie can head off awkward misunderstandings. Many forums also use smilies to personalise the discussions by having some topic-specific smilies available.

And, yes, I know we can go to the annoying lengths of creating Photobucket albums to store some common smilies, open a window for Photobucket, search the album, and copy and paste the URL every time we want to use a smilie that isn't one of the handful of standard ones, but it would be a lot easier to add some of the more popular ones to the smilie gallery. Nobody's being forced to use them.

It's quite possible to put a limit on the number of smilies used in a post so that you don't have cases where posts are overloaded with them. But I really don't much like this idea that acres of unrelieved plain text are somehow intellectually superior and that resorting to smilies is a symptom of some sort of deficiency in the ability to write or to think. That just seems like intellectual snobbery.

Since you asked.
ai49.photobucket.com_albums_f298_tnbskts_Smilies_flowers.gif
 
What's wrong with hotlinking ? There are a lot of free smilies webpages even offering the direct img-tag for copy and paste. Not that I would mind about the smilies.
 
Some smilie repositories don't seem to mind hotlinking, but some of them do. I suppose it just depends which ones you're using.
 
crylaugh.gif


sparkchaser said:
ai5.photobucket.com_albums_y187_sparkchaser1998_smileys_withstupid.gif

That's what I do. I host smileys I like on my photobucket account.
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Champagne said:
There seems to be an attitude by some here that using smilies is in some way unworthy of people who are interested in the written word.
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You're close to my attitude, at the very least. I don't really see the point of having any more than what we have. We have ones to show anger, sarcasm, whoops, confusion, etc. and these pretty much run the gamut of what you would need to ensure the tone of a post is reinforced. Popcorn and can-of-worms or pointless smilies holding up banners are, I think, really schlocky and are graphically inconsistent with the ones that are already here.

Also, an abundance of smilies on a forum means more graphics being cached on users' machines, amongst their temporary internet files. Fair enough, they are small graphics and the disk space taken up is minimal.

If anything, what we need smilie wise are ratings; one star, two star, three star, four star, and five star, in order to rate the books we've read. But horrid yellow cirlces banging heads off walls and waving welcome placards? Give me a break. If you can't just say hello or welcome without a smilie, there's something far wrong.


I really don't much like this idea that acres of unrelieved plain text are somehow intellectually superior and that resorting to smilies is a symptom of some sort of deficiency in the ability to write or to think. That just seems like intellectual snobbery.
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Where on earth did you get that interpretation from? It seems unfounded.
 
Stewart said:
You're close to my attitude, at the very least. I don't really see the point of having any more than what we have. We have ones to show anger, sarcasm, whoops, confusion, etc. and these pretty much run the gamut of what you would need to ensure the tone of a post is reinforced. Popcorn and can-of-worms or pointless smilies holding up banners are, I think, really schlocky and are graphically inconsistent with the ones that are already here.
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However, you have several people asking for more smilies. So, sure, go ahead and say, "no, we're not having them, I don't like them and my opinion is the one that matters." But it would be nice if that message came across without the added baggage that the people asking for smilies are lacking in intelligence, literacy, and taste.

Also, an abundance of smilies on a forum means more graphics being cached on users' machines, amongst their temporary internet files. Fair enough, they are small graphics and the disk space taken up is minimal.
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Indeed.

If anything, what we need smilie wise are ratings; one star, two star, three star, four star, and five star, in order to rate the books we've read. But horrid yellow cirlces banging heads off walls and waving welcome placards? Give me a break. If you can't just say hello or welcome without a smilie, there's something far wrong.
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I don't think anyone here is incapable of saying hello or welcome without using smilies. As I hope you well know. However, you're seeing several people who think it's sufficiently helpful to use smilies that we're jumping through the hoops of storing them at photo-hosting sites and then having to go and find them and post URLs in order to add smilies to posts. Which means that there's a demand for them by at least some of the regular posters here, most of whom don't seem to be deficient in written-English skills. Since there's a demand - as shown by the existence of two recent threads asking for smilies if nothing else - it would be nice if the management responded in ways other than suggesting that we're incapable of managing simple English without them.


Where on earth did you get that interpretation from? It seems unfounded.
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I guess from your comment in the other thread: "You mean you can't express yourself with words on a forum where one would expect to find literacy?" Obviously he didn't mean anything of the sort, as should be obvious from the literacy level of many of the people using smilies, but that response sounded very much as though you were saying that smilies are the last resort of the ignorant and stupid. Which to me comes across as intellectual snobbery. My apologies if that was not your intent.
 
So far there are fewer "I don't want smilies" posts than "I do want smilies" posts. Not clear whether the people not taking part in the conversation are in favour, opposed, or indifferent.

Fine by me if the management decides not to add them, as long as we don't start down the road of "you may not post smilies from Photobucket albums either." I just don't like the implication that the people wanting smilies are a bunch of ignorant and illiterate nitwits who are demanding the right to damage the forum.
 
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