I use them just because I like to! It kind of helps to express what you are tryign to get out and they are just really fun to use haha. Pretty much all of my posts have some sort of smilie in it Whether it is from the Trap17 selection or just ones that I like to use .

As you might have guessed by the content of this post, I sometimes use smilies whenever I want to emphasize my comments a bit further...if I can't find the right words to express my feelings at the time of typing.

BTW...check out the new avatar! (There you go...you'll probably won't see another smilie from me for a while now.)

This post has been edited by shigajet: May 2 2007, 12:42 AM

Well I think it is ok to use smilies sparingly. just as long as it is not obnoxious. Using to many smilies in my opinion is very distastful, and extremely distracting. A simple is ok every now and then, as long as your uses are spaced out!

I sometimes use them, mostly only when I feel they are needed or will spice up the post. I don't like those who over use smilies, over use by the same one over and over and over again.

I don't use them very often myself. When I do use them, it's usually just a , , or smiley to indicate sarcasm. They can be nice additions to posts, but it's extremely annoying when people use them every second sentence, it crowds the post and makes it more difficult to read.

I don't use the emote smilies, I use text smilies though.

^^, <.<, >.<. xD

They seem a lot more fun to me. I personally can't stand the picture smilies, I'm not sure why. It's probably a secondary characterestic or a subconscious thing, n00bs generally tend to abuse those smilies so some part of my mentality tends to dislike them. (A n00b and a newb are different, just to clarify)

I don't use smilies in forum posts or twitter posts. I mostly use them in IRC and IM. Smilies are useful for sarcasm and jokes, as mentioned before.
I've met people that make it a habit to punctuate every sentence with a smilie.

That kinda looks like this.



and so on like that. This can annoy some people. I am sort of neutral with smilies, as long as they are not overused.
I sometimes use them in sigs of forums that I visit though.

The use of smilies really depends on the person and what they are talking about. A technical tutorial might not have a whole lot of smilies,
but a list of one-liners probably would be riddled with them.

If a person that likes to be funny is writing the technical tutorial, there might be more smilies than a person that really
just wants to write the tutorial and code.

People shouldn't use a whole lot of different types of smilies. Even though some people can come up with thousands of smilies,
only about twenty should be used.

That's all just my opinion, of course.

This post has been edited by possible123: Jun 19 2007, 10:42 PM

Yar, most of the time I use text smilies. Text smilies don't have any noticable effect on load time or CPU usage, haven't had their reputations ruined because of spammers, can express just as much, if not more emotion then image smileys, and can be slipped into posts more often without getting annoying.

I like smilies!
They can be quite helpful in many instances. When you converse with someone with text only, and the person cannot hear the "tone" of your voice, it happens often that statements can be taken the wrong way. Think of a simple statement like, "What are you talking about?" Said in a hateful tone, o