Tuesday, October 2, 2007

How to Post Graphic Smilies in Forums

The majority of today's forums using bbCode have their own graphic smilies that can be posted in messages.

I can't tell you what are the codes for smilies because of a simple fact that each forum has its own codes, but they shouldn't be difficult to add to your posts using advanced automated editors. Usually, you can see images of available smilies on those editors, to insert one into the message you're typing, you just click on its image & the code is inserted. There's maybe a link to a page containing more smileys & their codes. When you finish your posting & submit, smilies codes will be converted to graphic smilies.

The difference between the codes for smileys & others we saw previously, is that they don't contain tags. Smiles codes can be anything chosen by the forum administration, for example, a smiling face, could have the code ":)" or ":smile:", etc; a sad smile could have as code ":(" or ":sad:", etc. As I said it all depends on the community you post in, when you use the codes few times you'll most likely remember them & be able to type them manually in your messages.

Example:

Let's say the smiley smile.gif has the code :smile: in the forum you're part of, if you type this:

Hello! Nice to be here! :smile:

The final message will look:

Hello! Nice to be here! smile

In the next post I'll tell you how to post smilies that are not present in the forum smile