Which of our vast collection of smilies do you use the most? While I am slowly pruning at the collection over time, having a sizable collection is fun...but I know frustrates some of you a lot when you want a specific one. Asyncritus came up with a great compromise: putting the most used smilies on the default page where they are immediately accessable and those who want a lot of variety will still have the collection available. There are no usage numbers to reference, so I come to you to find out what smilies should be in the capsulized default collection.
:wtfturn: Didn't know we had a poledancing smiley...that'll be useful once I learn picture worthy tricks.
Eliminate the flags and the holiday ones to start with. Oh and the stupid pedo bear shit. And the rep ones cause rep don't matter no more..... Then do what Async said. Put the most used ones on one page and the rest on another page.
:the smiling klan guy with a username smilie: :J: There are some others, but I don't remember them offhand and when I've looked for them I can't find them in the morass of smilies. For the record, you can absolutely get rid of for all it gets used.
Okay, trying to put these into alphabetical order, to make it easier to see what has already been suggested. Combining all those already named (unless they don't correspond to a smilie) and a few others that I either use myself or have seen others use fairly often, I get the following list: : ) ; ) : ? : : async : : bailey : : banana : : bang : : beck : : bergman : : bigass : : blink : : blush : : borg : : brood : : brokeback : : busheeep : : calli : : chris : : clyde : : cylon : : damnkids : : dayton : : dendroica : : diacanu : : doh : : eh : : elwood : : enty: : ep2 : : evilpop : : facepalm : : finger : : flow : : flow2 : :flow2: : frog : : fun : : garamet : : geezer : : hail : : happydance : : huh : : itsokay : : j : : jayzus : : krieg : : mad : : marathon : : mob : : mrsa : : muad : : muad2 : : nono : : nyer : : ohnoes : : P : PGT : : pissed : : ramen : : rant : : rimshot : : rolleyes : : rotfl : : sarek : : shades : : shakefist : : shock : : shrug : : soholy : : soma : : storm : : techman : : TKO : : ualbert : : unsure : : vomit : : what : : wtf : : wtfturn : :wtfturn: : wub : : yeehaw : : yes : : yuck : : zod : : zodiac : : zzz : That's 85 so far. One thing that is blatantly obvious is that those calling for cutting the list down to 20 or 30 and outright eliminating all the others are way off the mark. There are a lot more than that that people want and use, fairly regularly. It may be however that some of those suggested could be on other pages because, even though one or two people might like to use them occasionally, that does not necessarily make them "common smilies." Still, I'm thinking there will have to be a minimum of 60 or 80 at least on the "common smilies" page. Maybe we could have another poll, once a good number have been "nominated," to see which ones people think should be on the "common smilies" page, having picked (and announced) a number ahead of time. Then, those top vote-getters go on the page and the others stay where they are. I would also like to add that I don't see the sense in any of the calls to get rid of others, though. What is the advantage to it? If someone is not interested in them, they don't have to look at those pages.
The issue is twofold - First is performance, loading the emoticon library can take more than a moment or two. And second is convenience, nobody enjoys searching through pages and pages of (mostly unused) emoticons every time they want to add a smiley to a post.
If load is a problem, fine. But no one has to "serach through pages and pages of (mostly unused) emoticons" for those that are all grouped on a single page. Most of the calls to eliminate smilies have concerned whole pages.
We agree, if it's a performance issue dump the emoticons. I never said anything about "serach" More than a few times I've searched through pages and pages of (mostly unused) emoticons to find what I was looking for.
I would think that having so many smilies may still slow the board down, no? I'd agree that some pruning would be in order because it does get frustrating to find something, like : movingthegoalpost : (the octopus-looking one) for . example, and we've got another goalpost smilie (the single one that moves). We've also got a gazillion categories to search through as well.
Actually, there are 4: "Politics and Debate," "Mockery and Insults," "Emotions" and "Miscellaneous." The rest are specific enough that you don't have to look through them unless you know that what you want is of that nature, in which case having them in a separate category is a good thing. I'm running Windows XP on an old machine, and even with that clunky a setup I find the number of categories about right. If the ones used most often were grouped together on one page that comes up by default, that would be good enough for me. Maybe it would still be a problem for those running off a phone or something, but I think it would be a shame to limit WF to what is best for phones.
Oh! I just thought of a very common one that hasn't been mentioned yet: : lol : That one has to be available for sure.