ORG's emoticons

[Maltz]

My all-time favorite is the smiling & bowing ashigaru.

But honestly I feel most smileys we have feel a little outdated (they belong to the age where people need to spend 2 seconds to load a 8 kb gif picture), and many of them are rarely being used. I wonder whether we can look forward to a new set of emoticons?

I was born in Taiwan, so I'd like to mention this set called "onion heads" done by a Taiwanese artist.
http://www.gyps.tyc.edu.tw/gy500/rex...ic/index1.html

What's your favorite emoticon sets?

I cannot draw comics, but I can use some photoshop. So if we decide on a new set but decides to keep the Bowing Ashigaru, I can PS the hat on an existing bowing model.

[PanzerJaeger]

The little yellow guy is a bit of an .org tradition and I would hate for him to go away completely, but I do agree that there is room for some more graphically advanced sets. I do not know anything about integrating such sets into the site, though.

[Montmorency]

Smilies - with bodies?

Some corruption begs not the cloth, but the knife. Sin is sin...

[frogbeastegg]

All smiley suggestions will be considered.

I was born in Taiwan, so I'd like to mention this set called "onion heads" done by a Taiwanese artist.
http://www.gyps.tyc.edu.tw/gy500/rex...ic/index1.html

For some reason only four of those images load. The rest all display broken image notification. Does anyone else have this problem?

[rickinator9]

All smiley suggestions will be considered.


For some reason only four of those images load. The rest all display broken image notification. Does anyone else have this problem?

I only have four load too. Only in the upper row. You're not the only one.

I also don't really like those smilies.

[Maltz]

It used to work fine. Here is a screenshot (but they are all animated):
http://7.blog.xuite.net/7/0/0/b/1155...28074863/0.png

I am also open to other emoticon ideas.

[frogbeastegg]

Hello, Maltz.

I asked staff to take a look at the suggested set. The general feeling was that because they are so cute they do not fit that well with the site's visual theme, e.g. our avatars and the S2TW skin. We'd probably also have problems getting them integrated with the board software, as none of us can see the animated versions properly. Are there any others you would like to suggest?

(I loved numbers 42 and 96 on that set!)

[Maltz]

No problem - just a suggestion. I don't have any other set in mind, and I will be happy to see if other people have suggestions or ideas about how to improve the existing set.

Maybe we can work out/modify a set that fits the theme? (What's the theme?)

[Peasant Phill]

Maybe we can work out/modify a set that fits the theme? (What's the theme?)

We are a fan site about a war game with currently a Japanese cycle.
But maybe a bit less cute could already work.

[frogbeastegg]

No problem - just a suggestion. I don't have any other set in mind, and I will be happy to see if other people have suggestions or ideas about how to improve the existing set.

Maybe we can work out/modify a set that fits the theme? (What's the theme?)

The theme is a reasonably mature styling with a faint hint of history. Doesn't particularly matter which era of history, or which country. The mature part is more important than the history part, although both can (and have) been bent where there's popular support for doing so.

Overall, it's probably easier to say what doesn't fit. The obvious, easy one which goes without saying is: nothing which would fall under 'not safe for work'. Anything themed to a non-TW game, TV series, etc would be rather out of place. I'd like to have a dancing Prinny (from the Disgaea series) smiley but alas, undead penguins don't fit in. Whilst there's no particular cartoon style we wouldn't accept, a lot of Westerners do tend to view cute as childish or aimed at women. A lot of our audience here consists of males, late teens and up. Anything too flashy would be turned down: no busy animations which the eye will find difficult to ignore. We prefer smaller icons as they do not distort the text layout as much, although there are a few notable exceptions to this such as the jawdropping smiley. After that it's mostly a case by case basis, see how people feel about the suggestion and decide from there.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Comparing the ORG with other forums, I don't think that the ORG lacks in the smiley department. Quite the opposite, in fact.

[Husar]

What Tellos says, sometimes it takes me really long to find the smiley I'm looking for, maybe we need more categories or so.

Then again, more is always better but I'm not sure what kind of smilies we could or should add, the vintage ones are usually my favourites because they're not excentric, overdone and don't make you look crazy for using them. Also the first person to suggest ICQ smilies gets instagibbed.

On that note though, and now that you got the gears in my head turning and swirling around (it's really loud...), how about more symbols? As in not faces that show emotions but signs with text or symbols like the hammer and sickle, a star, a car, a cat, a dog etc.
I'm not sure how often they'd be used but creative people can make funky posts with them if there are enough to choose from, right? Right?

[Kralizec]

If anything, there are too many smilies. Sometimes a situation calls for a very specific one you remembered and you have to spend several minutes trying to find it in the list.

[TinCow]

If anything, there are too many smilies. Sometimes a situation calls for a very specific one you remembered and you have to spend several minutes trying to find it in the list.

When you first click the smiley box, you get a set list of specific smilies and then you have to click 'More' to see the rest of them. At some point, I put in a bunch of smilies that I thought I had seen used regularly into the quick access selection, but there wasn't much thought put into it. If there are smilies you'd like to have added to that selection, or which you think should be removed from it, let me know and I'll adjust it.

[drone]

At some point in the past (prior to the vb4 upgrade maybe), each member could personalize the quick access smileys. We could select 20-25 of our favorites. Is this possible with the latest version of vB?

[Kralizec]

When you first click the smiley box, you get a set list of specific smilies and then you have to click 'More' to see the rest of them. At some point, I put in a bunch of smilies that I thought I had seen used regularly into the quick access selection, but there wasn't much thought put into it. If there are smilies you'd like to have added to that selection, or which you think should be removed from it, let me know and I'll adjust it.

The "commonly used" section seems to cover the vast majority of smiley usage. The point I was trying to make is that there are so many smilies, that everytime you need a particulary outlandish or specific smiley, it's probably in the list there somewhere. More of a luxury "problem" actually.

[Arjos]

Just check Pizza's last mafia game at the gameroom: there are plenty of emoticons and they are very funny ^^

[TinCow]

At some point in the past (prior to the vb4 upgrade maybe), each member could personalize the quick access smileys. We could select 20-25 of our favorites. Is this possible with the latest version of vB?

Yeah, unfortunately that was a vB3 module which was never ported over to vB4.

[Peasant Phill]

Wouldn't categorizing smilies (as mentioned before) make it a lot easier?
Categories like shogun, holidays, emotions, ...

[TinCow]

They actually are categorized at the moment... just poorly. If someone wants to help figure out a new categorization/organization system, I'd be happy to implement it.

[Maltz]

Is the current system ranking smileys by their usage? It might be a way to get the more popular and useful ones bumped to the little window.

***

As the thread opener here is my honest thought.

I understand and fully respect the maturity to keep the smileys simple, varied, and not too visually distracting. Actually not a lot of people even use smileys in their discussions in many ORG's topics. It almost feels like that people think using too many smileys looks childish and purposely refrain from it. It is perfectly fine.

But since I just returned to the ORG after maybe 6 years of absence, I have noticed that how the "outside world" has been changing. The ORG's small smileys really look outdated today, although they did look superb and were the mainstream.

I also recognize that the ORG are currently mainly patronized by western users who in general equate cuteness to childish or feminine. But at least in East Asia, where more than 1.5 billion people live and start flocking to the internet, cuteness or gender neutral appearance is actually quite acceptable among males. When I walk in the malls in Osaka, Japan, 25% of men wears pink shirts. Movie stars often appear gender neutral. Maintaining a masculinity image is not very important in some cultures.

A great thing about the smileys is that it is optional. So I hope people are still open to the introduction of fancier systems - if you do not like them, you do not use them. Having some catchy or cute smileys attract mainly the younger fans, but these people will grow up to become the next generation of ORG primary contributors. And at that time they will talk like you do today.

In addition, cute emoticons are very useful in stories.

[TinCow]

They are currently ranked by my own fickle whims. There's no way to get them to auto-sort based on usage, so it's just a question of figuring out what to put where.

On a technical level, I don't see any reason why we couldn't just have more sets of smilies. Unless we were able to find a replacement for every single existing smiley, we'd have to keep the current ones anyway, otherwise old threads would have their smiley images broken. So, we could just add a new set of more 'modern' smilies to the existing one so that all options are available. Old fuddie-duddies could continue using the traditional ones, and those fancy new jive hepcats with their bellbottoms and their boogaloo could use the new fangled types.

[Andres]

Boogaloo?

What in Andres' name is "Boogaloo" ?

[TinCow]

It's that thing the young-uns do in the disco these days.

[frogbeastegg]

But since I just returned to the ORG after maybe 6 years of absence, I have noticed that how the "outside world" has been changing. The ORG's small smileys really look outdated today, although they did look superb and were the mainstream

Could you give links to some of the sites? Then we can take a look.

[Maltz]

onion heads.zip

Here is the "onion head" set that we talked about earlier - the full animated versions that I downloaded straight from another forum. There are also others around but I think this one is very representative. Please feel free to suggest others.

[frogbeastegg]

We'll investigate both of these points, see what we can do.

Thanks for proving the zipfile.

[Husar]

Smileys should be implemented now, let us know if you find something wrong with them, I tried my best to make the descriptions fit while keeping them relatively short.
They can be found under Onion Heads and all replace a text like :on_[description]: where the [description]-part is replaced with the description chosen for that smiley.

[Beskar]

Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Big thank you, Husar-chan I have always found a big affection for these smilies.

Now to list each forum member by smilie.

- ACIN
- Left Eye Nine
- Askthepizzaguy
- Andres
- TinCow
- Secura

More to come!

[Monk]

Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Big thank you, Husar-chan I have always found a big affection for these smilies.

Now to list each forum member by smilie.

- ACIN
- Left Eye Nine
- Askthepizzaguy
- Andres
- TinCow
- Secura

More to come!

I hate everything.