Selfsufficientish.com

How are these smileys designed? Do u do it Andy?
I found some super smileys on another forum which I saved to a folder (am I allowed to do that? ) and tried to use in an email to a friend. She couldnt see them tho, only a red cross in the corner - does anyone know why this is please?

I love them and think they make it so much more fun on forums and emails. It was always difficult to judge peoples moods in an email but these help so much. Hooray for the smileys!!

Hi Chadspad
Download loads from www.smileycentral.com
It's a quick, painless experience (literally seconds on broadband). It's free, too. although some can't be inserted into a forum (if anyone knows a cheat to this I'd like to know).
Alternatively, switch to the Firefox browser (if you haven't already) and there's a smiley extention for download. Somewhat more limited, but easy to use in message boards.

do a google search for smilies/smiley. there are loads of sites where you can download them from

chadspad wrote:...tried to use in an email to a friend. She couldnt see them tho, only a red cross in the corner - does anyone know why this is please?

It may be to do with the way her email client is set up. Originally, email was a text-only format, and some of us like to keep our email clients set that way.

...and then wrote:I love them and think they make it so much more fun on forums and emails. It was always difficult to judge peoples moods in an email but these help so much. Hooray for the smileys!!

Look, um, how can I say this without appearing to be an elderly stick-in-the-mud...? I can't! Right [grits teeth]: I hate the bleeding things. There! I said it! Now I guess I'll have to endure no end of smart-arsed replies full of smilies just to taunt me. Well let me tell you that ad-blockers work on more than just advertisements.

Thing is, for thousands of years we've been using the written word to communicate with each other. Every mood and emotion imaginable has been successfully conveyed by the written word alone. Now, suddenly, since the advent of electronic forums, we seem unable to do that.

That's a puzzle to me.

If we don't litter our messages with these horrible little distractions, people think we are being rude, or unpleasant. Soon we will be trapped by them, unable to write anything without them for fear of being misunderstood. We will become, in a way, illiterate; only able to convey sentiment through pre-defined graphic icons; communication will become clumsey and tokenised, without the flexibility that words have.

I'm please to think that I have never used one of these things. Well, I might have used one once. But it was an accident I tell you, and I was probably drunk at the time.

I remain, grumpily yours,

I have a lot of sympathy with that view but it does help to use emoticons sometimes. I mod on several forums where a lot of the posters have English as a second language and even Americans speak a different language a lot of the time - the first few times I was told "thanks a bunch" I was fairly offended - being used to the UK interpretation where that's normally sarcasm.

I won't use the things in e-mails or PM's to people I know well but they are a huge help to soften a critisism or show that you mean something in a friendly way, especially when you have a dry sense of humour or similar.

Although I would happily hurt whoever created the incredibly awful waving smiley and the wiggling monkey ones (note lack of lol emoticon indicating that was a joke here). There are some emotions which are better left unpictured imho.....

I think sometimes they are useful to get across what you mean quickly but sometimes they are overused or just pointless - there are smilies for everything! I have a sister who's 14 and its hard enought to understand what she's typing without all the little jumping faces getting in the way

Thanks for your replies folks!