You might have noticed today that the smiley panel on the right side of these forums looks a little bit different. I was finally able to go through and update the forum smileys, which were long overdue for an overhaul. There were two major problems with the old system:
* Many of the forum smileys looked terrible, failing to fit in with the background and sticking out like sore thumbs.
* The forum software only displays the first 15 smileys when composing posts; to see the rest, you have to open up a separate window. However, there were some extremely rarely used smilies in those first 15, while very common smileys were buried down at the bottom of the list. There was a need for a more rational selection in the basic list.
To cover the first point, I went through and updated a lot of the basic smileys. Here's a comparison between old and new:
Basic Smile
Old: :oldsmiley:
New:
Frown Smiley
Old: :oldfrown:
New:
Wink Smiley
Old: :oldwink:
New:
Eek Smiley
Old: :oldeek:
New:
Tongue Smiley
Old: :oldtongue:
New:
The old ones look like crap as far as I'm concerned, and they've been bugging me for years, so much that I'd link in non-terrible smileys from my own website in posts. I hope that all of you agree that these are much better. (They are actually smaller filesizes as well, although probably too small to see any difference in page load speeds.) If you prefer the old ones, they are all still there to be used. Type "oldsmiley" for the old smile, "oldfrown" for the old frown, and so on. The basic key strokes have been shifted to the new smileys displayed here.
For the second task, I tried to pick out some of the most useful smileys. The elaborate sort of stuff that you see in the Diablo and Guild Wars smileys might look impressive, but they aren't very practical. Basic things like smiling, laughing, frowning, sad or mad, and so on are the stuff that come up most often. You can now access them just by clicking over on the right side. I also tried to organize the larger list so that more useful things are up near the top, to prevent the need to scroll down in the separate smileys window.
Feel free to let me know if you want something added to the smileys list. I can upload them directly to the server. I'll probably add another few myself later when I have some more time. I've been collecting quite a large group over the years for my website.
* Many of the forum smileys looked terrible, failing to fit in with the background and sticking out like sore thumbs.
* The forum software only displays the first 15 smileys when composing posts; to see the rest, you have to open up a separate window. However, there were some extremely rarely used smilies in those first 15, while very common smileys were buried down at the bottom of the list. There was a need for a more rational selection in the basic list.
To cover the first point, I went through and updated a lot of the basic smileys. Here's a comparison between old and new:
Basic Smile
Old: :oldsmiley:
New:
Frown Smiley
Old: :oldfrown:
New:
Wink Smiley
Old: :oldwink:
New:
Eek Smiley
Old: :oldeek:
New:
Tongue Smiley
Old: :oldtongue:
New:
The old ones look like crap as far as I'm concerned, and they've been bugging me for years, so much that I'd link in non-terrible smileys from my own website in posts. I hope that all of you agree that these are much better. (They are actually smaller filesizes as well, although probably too small to see any difference in page load speeds.) If you prefer the old ones, they are all still there to be used. Type "oldsmiley" for the old smile, "oldfrown" for the old frown, and so on. The basic key strokes have been shifted to the new smileys displayed here.
For the second task, I tried to pick out some of the most useful smileys. The elaborate sort of stuff that you see in the Diablo and Guild Wars smileys might look impressive, but they aren't very practical. Basic things like smiling, laughing, frowning, sad or mad, and so on are the stuff that come up most often. You can now access them just by clicking over on the right side. I also tried to organize the larger list so that more useful things are up near the top, to prevent the need to scroll down in the separate smileys window.
Feel free to let me know if you want something added to the smileys list. I can upload them directly to the server. I'll probably add another few myself later when I have some more time. I've been collecting quite a large group over the years for my website.
![[Image: evil.gif]](http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/warblade/images/evil.gif)
