THE PACK Message Boards

I hate to say this, I really do, because a lot of members have dedicated a fair amount of work and imagination into our Wolf Smilies, but does anyone else here have the itching to reduce the number of Wolf-Emotes we have?

Although I can understand keeping the majority of our icons, there's a lot of repeat/useless emoticons that are juust cluttering everything else up. For example:

• We have two Willy Wonka Wolves
• We have two I-Pod wolves
• Among other wolves that were created for a specific topic or idea and never used again

I don't mean this to hurt anyone who has made an Emote, but I'd like to know if anyone else notices any wolves that should not really be on the list.

*weighs in*

I think that we don't have too many emoticons... but I think that they could be better organized, perhaps by type of emoticons (so I don't go searching everywhere to see what ways to ducky the newly bitten members). That will probably make it easier to use. Though, there are some emotes, like ones for certain holidays, that don't see use except a few days a year.

I don't really think we have to many. They're not doing any harm just sitting there. (but then I have my own set to use which is not excessive at all. I use every one every single day! XD

It's funny, there are a couple of us who use a set (that's not specifically mine on my forums) that I use...

I'd have to agree with Baph, it's probably not necessary to remove them, but instead we can organise them.

Perhaps we could jury-rig in a bit of Javascript to organise the plugins according to little buttons, so if the user clicked the ducky button, the emoticons would filter down to just those that used duckies. By default, we could have it on a page that shows only a default group of emoticons, just those that display emotions, that could be considered the general tab/button, then everything that doesn't fall under that could be sorted into their own sections. So we could have; General, Ducky, Fun, and Crazy (fun leaning towards standard emoticons that don't fit in general, crazy leaning towards emoticons that aren't of a standard size).

Those probably aren't the best ideas for categories of course, and since I'm not too familiar with phpBB I wouldn't know how to begin going about this, but it may be a good solution if we could talk someone into implementing it.

Vagrant- I think that's a great idea.

I do wish that individual users could upload their own icon set outside of the main wolf icons. It gets a little tedious having to go to photobucket and copy the code every time I want to use my smileys.

PariahPoet wrote:I do wish that individual users could upload their own icon set outside of the main wolf icons. It gets a little tedious having to go to photobucket and copy the code every time I want to use my smileys.

That's a great idea, too. It might be a bit of a strain on the server to host all individual smiley-sets though, so I'd imagine the most serviceable solution would probably be a system of dynamically linking img strings to :words: (so :ppjoy: would equal <img>http://fakeurl/emoticons/joy.jpg</img>) within the user's profile.

Though here's something you could use as a temporary solution, if you're using a Mozilla variant (inc. Firefox) to browse at least.

PariahPoet wrote:I do wish that individual users could upload their own icon set outside of the main wolf icons. It gets a little tedious having to go to photobucket and copy the code every time I want to use my smileys.

Something I used to do was, I created a simple Text File that I would open in Notepad when I log onto a forum I used my Smileys on. When I wanted to use one, I just copy and pasted the URL links to my ImageShack files from there.

Not ideal ... but it worked well enough. (I deleted it a while back, which is why I haven't used mine in a while)

PariahPoet wrote:I don't really think we have to many. They're not doing any harm just sitting there.

They kind of are when it becomes a hassle to load up all the icons and find the exact icon I want. But if no one else see's a problem with the number of emotes, then it really isn't that big of an issue to me, anyway.


Anyhow, the organization idea is spectacular! And I was thinking about that myself, I just don't know whether or not that's a possible option.

Another suggestion for those who use custom icon sets: If you have your own forum, I leave the 'view more emoticons' page open and just find the one I want from there, right click, 'copy image location' and use the IMG tags here (or wherever) I'm posting. No text files to maintain, but it only works if you has can your own forum with your smilies on it.

Organization is a fine idea.

I have not noticed there being too many.

outwarddoodles wrote:Anyhow, the organization idea is spectacular! And I was thinking about that myself, I just don't know whether or not that's a possible option.

It's possible, I've seen some amazing things done with phpBB, and it's still one of the most modifiable boards out there, despite what claims to plugins other boards might have.

I'll do a little hunting around and see if I can find anything specific that's free. if not, it'll just be a matter of finding someone who's willing to modify the HTML generation of the little smiley popup, such a thing can be done entirely on the client-side, so it's even easier than one may expect initially.

It may even be possible with CSS, goodness knows I've done some clinically insane things with CSS, including one page that had various forms of content that would show dynamically based on mouse positions, clicks, and whatnot. I'm rusty these days though, and I don't know what's changed, but I could try if that were necessary.

Anyway, for now, I'll nose around for freebies.

[Edited.]

Ta-daa!

Ahem, that should do the trick.

Vagrant wrote:It's possible, I've seen some amazing things done with phpBB, and it's still one of the most modifiable boards out there, despite what claims to plugins other boards might have.

I'll do a little hunting around and see if I can find anything specific that's free. if not, it'll just be a matter of finding someone who's willing to modify the HTML generation of the little smiley popup, such a thing can be done entirely on the client-side, so it's even easier than one may expect initially.

It may even be possible with CSS, goodness knows I've done some clinically insane things with CSS, including one page that had various forms of content that would show dynamically based on mouse positions, clicks, and whatnot. I'm rusty these days though, and I don't know what's changed, but I could try if that were necessary.

Anyway, for now, I'll nose around for freebies.

[Edited.]

Ta-daa!

Ahem, that should do the trick.

The link provided is solely for phpBB2; we're using phpBB3. Otherwise yes, phpBB is customizable to any form due to being open source; this is why people shouldn't WASTE MONEY on proprietary crap like vBulletin or especially Invision Power Board (I think they tried to buy out phpBB once to make it closed-source, then tried to sue them when phpBB rejected of selling phpBB to them) because of how it EXCESSIVELY limits possibilities.

Otherwise it can be done with some PHP. You can't really just magically generate and associate smilies to categories with CSS. CSS is simply a standard for the presentation of content. What's mainly needed is underlying PHP code for handling categorization which doesn't take much work. Modifying phpBB to do so shouldn't take much effort to do; however it's something to be added to the to do list thus not being something that'll be instantly done.

Sorry, I missed that the Pack boards were running on v3 instead of v2, it was 3AM at the time so I didn't think to check. And the only smilies mod I could find for v3 had to be paid for, unfortunately, but perhaps at least the v2 mod I posted earlier could be a good starting point.

As for my idea, it was basically modifying the PHP (similar to what you mentioned) to put the smilies into div tables, which the CSS could then handle (show/hide). This could be much more easily accomplished with JS though, I'd imagine, as JS could do it entirely on the client-side (thus putting no extra stress on the server).

(Edited: I condensed this post down to just what it needed to be.)

.

I also agree that they need to be organized. It takes too long to find what Im looking for and I end up grazing over it several times and not seeing it. The movement all around kinda throws you off too.

I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but another way would be to put a text label under each emoticon and then include a dynamic search bar at the top (so that when someone types in "duck" everything with duckies in it comes up). Even without the dynamic search bar, a simple ctrl + f could bring up what you were looking for.

That's actually a pretty nifty idea, we might need to give the emoticons a more organised naming structure though (so if one were to search hat, they'd get all the smileys with hats), but beyond that I really don't see any problems with that approach either.

That'd work just as well as categorisation if it was structured right ... and as an added bonus, it's possible to do most of that (except for the renaming) from the client side. Perhaps as an Fx extension?

If we could have personal smilies, that'd be great. If you consider that they're all .gif files and not too many people have their own entire set, it shouldn't take up too much space.


Is it possible to have individual smilie packs? I figure even something like using your name abbreviation and then the smilie code--- like "::KZduckie::" for a specific me-style duckie, or something. Maybe using a 4 letter abbreviation, or even your membership number.

If you think we don't have too many smilies, here's a challenge for you: Respond to this message with the three following smilies in this order without finding the code by quoting this message (IE: look for them in order by selecting them off of the "View more smilies" menu:


I chose those three because I believe they could have a place in a typical forum conversation. The problem is that the emoticons we have that represent actual emotion are lost in a sea of emoticons, many of which were user-created just for the sake of being funny, like these:


Yes, they are amusing, but really, what other purpose do they have?

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.

And as Outward already pointed out, a lot of them are repeats of the same theme:





I'm not saying we need to get rid of the emoticons entirely, but I do think we should review them, separate emotion-applicable emotes from the non-applicables and simplify the default list of emotes.

As for where the extras should go. . . Well, I'm not ruling out another location at the Pack forum, but couldn't the creators just host their own emoticons? Remember the "Go Patriots!" emoticon I made last year?

I've got that hosted at Photobucket. Why not just let the creators themselves decide what to do with them?

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...

If you don't need any more Emoticons than are on the regular Smilies page, then don't "view more smilies."

Sometimes, I wish that other 'sites had this many smilies; but they don't.

Vagrant wrote: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.

This was why I said "leave it up to the creators." If the creators of said emoticons (or anyone else that wants to keep them) want to save them, they can save them, but we shouldn't be the obligation of the Pack to leave it a big mess like it is now just because the creators might elect not to.

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?

There's only two logical ways to handle that:

1) Choose the one that takes up the smallest amount of memory.
2) Vote.

It might seem "awkward" to you, but then again, so is just leaving it the way it is to me. If I can host my emoticon at my own image hosting page, why can't they?

Terastas wrote:It might seem "awkward" to you, but then again, so is just leaving it the way it is to me. If I can host my emoticon at my own image hosting page, why can't they?

That's not exactly what I meant though, consider the context. It may be functionally awkward to some to have them there, whereas others may not be bothered by it. However, it would be socially awkward to vote on the perfect emoticons to keep, while we discard the others.

To put it bluntly, I know I wouldn't want to hold a voting contest regarding which emoticons are too worthless to keep. That's what seems the overriding kind of awkward to me, but that's largely my empathy talking, I admit ... and I can't help that.

I don't know, I concede that perhaps you're right, as I don't really have much to add to this any more, but I did want to clarify what it was I was on about.