annoying smileys

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

would it be possible to edit the scripting so that smileys don't appear when the characters are adjacent to "non-space" characters. e.g. MMD will show a smiley when it is clearly intended to show MM : DD (remove spaces). it just irritates me when this happens.

[Zelmo]

Well, there is a checkbox to "Disable smilies in text." It's in the Additional Options, underneath the reply window.

Of course, that will disable all smilies; I don't know how you'd do a mixed mode.

[CodeRoot]

I've been thinking about this for some time, now...

d38dm8nw81k1ng clearly makes a good point -- and there's essentially "no excuse" for this -- it does not matter where the fix needs to be made (vBulletin?) - it should be simple enough to make...

Part of the recognition of smiley character sequences should (IMO) be based on the identification of a character sequence padded with at least one space before and after. That way, it would be impossible for adjacent characters (not intended to be part of the character sequence) to be mis-interpreted as part of the character sequence.

The spaces wouldn't necessarily have to be considered as an actual part of the character sequence, but would be required to properly identify a valid character sequence.

Make sense? It's real simple... Why hasn't/wasn't this incorporated into...???

"DUH!!!"

What do you think?

[techieMoe]

I agree. I've been annoyed many times before by smilies that popped up when I was trying to type something (usually in parentheses like this). I know that some of our smilies require a specific code for the forum to pick them up, such as the :: rolleyes :: smiley. Could we not tell the forum to only recognize those smilies and add a special colon code :: :: for the common ones?

[oz]

Disabling the smileys when needed, as suggested by Zelmo, is probably the simplest solution, but it would be hard to get all users to implement that option when it's needed.

It might be easier to make the forum software smarter than trying to make all the forum users smarter.

[CodeRoot]

Yes ---

The double-colon idea is definitely another approach worth considering -- presently, without having thought about it at length (yet) - I think there are probably very few situations where it would be misinterpreted (especially with two sets of double-colons, before and after)...

[Core Wizard]

I tried making the smilies as suggested by TechieMoe, but all the previous smileys were changed to simple text, and there's A LOT of smilies used around here, so changing them would be quite drastic... I don't know, I think that this is something that has grew so much we should simply bare, but then again, we can always change them, and scrap all the old smilies, what does everyone say?

Mark.

[techieMoe]

I tried making the smilies as suggested by TechieMoe, but all the previous smileys were changed to simple text, and there's A LOT of smilies used around here, so changing them would be quite drastic... I don't know, I think that this is something that has grew so much we should simply bare, but then again, we can always change them, and scrap all the old smilies, what does everyone say?

Mark.

I'm all for an overhaul on the smilies. Just make sure and keep the dancing banana. People are rather fond of that one for some reason.

[CodeRoot]

I don't understand why the old can't be translated into the new - it is simply a matter of converting from one set of 'rules' to another. The current 'rules' are already defined (the smileys are presently interpreted by them) - once the [new, thoroughly tested 'rule set' - that you are absolutely certain works well and will never have to be changed again ] is decided, write some code that will convert from the old to the new... You should even be able to prevent converting most if not all of the "slip-ups" that are happening now.

[CodeRoot]

For the sake and cause of linuxforums.org, it might be a good idea to use the traditional/historical character sequences enclosed by angle-brackets ('<' & '>'), square-brackets ('[' & ']'), or braces ('{' & '}') - i.e., '' would become '<>' OR '[]' OR '{}', whichever was decided to be used (read/see these in the character sequence form -- single quotes used to accentuate character sequences are not part of the character sequences).

Just a thought...