The only thing I took umbrage at was pruning, that's why I suggested organisation as an option instead.
The thing is, simply deleting (pruning) excess emoticons involves a lot of opinion, and it seems awkward. I'm sure that some of the ones that would be deleted would have had a lot of work put into them by the person involved, and it'd be sad to see that work go to waste. Whereas organisation would avoid that.
With an organised system, we could categorise each kind of smiley into its own section, so they're all still there but we don't have the visual clutter that the smiley screen has now. And that visual clutter really is the problem, isn't it?
Another awkward element I see is that
which of the doubles are superfluous is also down to opinion, what I'm getting at here is that we'd have to pick one of the duplicates, declare that as the real one, and then delete the rest. That seems awkward to me too. Do we have a system for determining how we'd go about that?
I'm not against pruning, but it does seem ... awkward to me, that's the only way I can put it. And if we do prune, I agree that we really should put the emoticons somewhere, even if it's just in a stickied thread, so they won't become lost to the forum over time.
Terastas wrote:Furthermore, do we really need these?
It took me less time to type "welcome to the pack," "happy birthday" and "welcome back" than it did to find them in the list of smilies.
This is another example of the awkward preferential issues I've been speaking about. You may find it easier to type those things, but the first of those emoticons is used almost invariably in introduction threads, from what I've seen. I know I've seen it around a lot, and I bet there would be a lot of people who'd be sad to see it go. It's just a nice welcoming emoticon to use.
And similarly, the birthday emoticon is used in the birthday thread, because there are those who prefer having a graphical representation rather than just typing, because that can help to convey emotion, to a degree, which is the job of an emoticon.
So I do think there are too many smilies, yes, absolutely, but I don't think that arbitrarily getting rid of a bunch of them might be the answer...