Emoticon Manager

[The Old Man]

Will we see an overhaul to the emoticons in IPB3.0? I'd like to see tabbed emoticons in the post editor so that members can select a range of themed smilies (Standard/Xmas/Large etc) from a tab in the RTE. Also, I think it should be easier to manage smilies, making it a simple and quick option to enable or disable a group of seasonal emoticons like Halloween, Xmas from the AdminCP: click to make 'em available to members in the emoticon tabs, click again to deactivate them.

Not sure if I explained this properly, I'm full of a heavy cold. Sorry!

[Josh]

There's not any drastic way to how emoticons are handled in 3.0. it works more or less just like IPB 2.

[Black Prowler]

that's the one thing they should have overhauled. :thumbsup: alas smileys are always overlooked :(

[TrixieTang]

that's the one thing they should have overhauled. :thumbsup: alas smileys are always overlooked :(

I have a feeling they will eventually make the emoticons easier to manage, they already said post icons will probably be made more useful eventually, just won't be in 3.0 though.

[.Sephiroth.]

Should make it so you can define unique emoticons per folder. Current setup makes no sense at all.

[Michael]

The current setup is so that you can have separate emoticon folders for light and dark skins, since the same emoticons don't always look right on each of those. Why would you need unique emoticons per folder?

[The Old Man]

There's not any drastic way to how emoticons are handled in 3.0. it works more or less just like IPB 2.

Thanks for the reply Josh, its a real shame though and missed opportunity. :(

that's the one thing they should have overhauled. :thumbsup: alas smileys are always overlooked :(

I totally agree, people have been asking for better smilie management and grouping for years.

Should make it so you can define unique emoticons per folder. Current setup makes no sense at all.

Again, I agree, its very confusing. I installed a skin the other day and it imported a few emoticons into the main emoticon group but they aren't visible in the second group. You can only assign one group per skin though.

[The Old Man]

The current setup is so that you can have separate emoticon folders for light and dark skins, since the same emoticons don't always look right on each of those. Why would you need unique emoticons per folder?

The problem is many board have 100's of smilies for different occasions and seasonal variants. Also as you say some for light skins, some for dark.
You should be able to manage these things in a simple way by the end of 2008, with the option to switch groups (for seasonal emoticons) on and off quickly and easily.

Also with dozens of smilies, the full list can be huge and means loads of scrolling. Tabbed browsing of emoticons would be much improved.

[Black Prowler]

I have a feeling they will eventually make the emoticons easier to manage, they already said post icons will probably be made more useful eventually, just won't be in 3.0 though.

they've been saying this for years as was pointed out above...so will it be IPB 4.0, 5.0, 10, etc.... :rolleyes:

It's obviously being put off as a not very important issue when large amounts of IPB Admins have been and continue to request this feature.

The problem is many board have 100's of smilies for different occasions and seasonal variants. Also as you say some for light skins, some for dark.

You should be able to manage these things in a simple way by the end of 2008, with the option to switch groups (for seasonal emoticons) on and off quickly and easily.

Also with dozens of smilies, the full list can be huge and means loads of scrolling. Tabbed browsing of emoticons would be much improved.

+1

When there are a large variety oe emoticons to choose from and then you add Holiday Emotes it does get pretty daunting trying to masnage them all. I do like the Tabbed Catagory idea and I would also suggest having a way to order the emotes so they can be arranged better by group. :cool:

[The Old Man]

Yes totally. I realise it must be a very daunting task and impossible to try and satisfy all major area of the board requests, but I firmly believe emoticons are as important as other areas of forum software. I reckon posts get more smilies in them than uploads, yet uploads bless their cotton socks get all the attention! I have absolutely no idea why smilies always seem to get left behind.

We're part way there, when you look at the smilie box opposite the posting screen with its previous and next group links, they are kind of like tabs or rather pages but its a shame you can't put them in order or group them. I have pages in the smiley box totally mixed up with large ones here, small ones there, a ghost here, a pumpkin there. (Songs like a song!) What a mess!

Are they in a-z order filename wise, or if I deleted the 180-odd smilies and added them back 1 at a time would they be in the order the way I want them or would I go insane? Then what if I want to add another small one in later on? D'oh the pain of it all!

I'm sure someone in the development team could be assigned to get the smilies into check if asked nicely! :wub: Sorry to whinge on.

[Josh]

My personal opinion is that simplicity is best for handling emoticons, especially on the front end. I don't think many users want to select emoticon categories, search them, tag them, etc. I would also guess that a vast majority of users don't even use the current emoticon popup, they probably just use the 'common' emoticons that are all auto converted by IPB. Now this is obviously not true for all forum users, but I think they system we have now works well for most users.

Having said that, the admin area could probably use a little work.

[The Old Man]

My personal opinion is that simplicity is best for handling emoticons, especially on the front end. I don't think many users want to select emoticon categories, search them, tag them, etc. I would also guess that a vast majority of users don't even use the current emoticon popup, they probably just use the 'common' emoticons that are all auto converted by IPB. Now this is obviously not true for all forum users, but I think they system we have now works well for most users.

Having said that, the admin area could probably use a little work.

Thanks for the reply Josh, I think we share some common ground here. Agreed its about simplicity, I'm hoping for a simpler system to display and manage them if you have a lot smilies. I too can't see the majority of end members searching smilies by tags or whatever. When you are posting, you want to find the one you want, quickly and easily. The most recent version of the smiley box went along way to achieving this, but it doesn't cater for those with a lot of smilies installed. It needs some help.

The forum creators here, as a thought, are used to running a site with 1000's of posts, so post management gets a lot of attention. Might it be possible, that since they don't administer a board with 100's of smilies, that they don't experience the inconvenience in running such a board and that's why smilies tend to get overlooked? No criticism, just contemplating!

However, just another related idea, I think if IPS were to keep the current method of displaying them in the clickable box, one suggestion might be if the board software updated the smiles included in the small box with the most frequently used ones out of those available, possibly by way of an entry in the task manager set to run every so often. This way the most popular smilies would appear in the first page of the previous/next box.

Thanks again.

[TrixieTang]

My personal opinion is that simplicity is best for handling emoticons, especially on the front end. I don't think many users want to select emoticon categories, search them, tag them, etc. I would also guess that a vast majority of users don't even use the current emoticon popup, they probably just use the 'common' emoticons that are all auto converted by IPB. Now this is obviously not true for all forum users, but I think they system we have now works well for most users.

Having said that, the admin area could probably use a little work.

Searching and tagging emoticons is excessive and really, quite pointless. However, I do think categories is a good idea, a lot of sites use emoticon sets, admins of such forums would definitely prefer having them grouped together rather than floating around being all lonely... :(

PS. THINK OF THE CHILDREN... err... THINK OF THE EMOTICONS!

[Josh]

I see your points and if it were kept as simple as providing categories, then it may work out ok. It's something we will keep in mind for the future :)

[The Old Man]

Thanks Josh!

[China J]

Here's the thing... When I first discovered forums, I was a smiley queen. I even used the popup to find smilies not normally used and even linked to smilies if I couldn't find one at the forum of my liking for the subject. However, now that I am a seasoned webmaster I find myself simply sticking to the basics such as :P :) :o :(

The thing is new members trying out neat cool things are excited by the bells and whistles as I once was, so being narrowed minded thinking that basic functions in the smiley area is ok is really not ok imo. The one thing that makes me feel this way is the annoying VB sites who's smileys rotate and they use that awful code :smile: which the average person does not have a clue when common messagers uses colon+) to make :)

Also, keep in mind every forum master has there own custom smilies and when you have to use their popup to find a smile or lol that they changed the format from colon+) to colon+> is quite annoying and even more annoying when the popup is all out of wack because of the abnormal smilies displayed.

I rather much click on a ajax tab based smilies that are organized into groups such as traditional, xmas, animated and etc than to weed thru some horrible examples of smilies bunched together with no rhyme or rhythm. infact, at some sites I get frustrated as hell just to even wait for the smiley popup to even appear cause some sites are slow as hell. :lol:

[Cool Surfer]

Emotions need to be improvised on the way how they are sorted. I had mentioned this some time back , a similar thing,
It need a change.

[The Old Man]

My smilies are still driving me insane. I want to organise them better, but I can't get my head around the fact the the default emoticon group has Delete Buttons for each smiley, but the add-on emoticon groups don't.

Say my skin is set to use smilies in Emoticon Group B. I want to un-assign Halloween and Christmas themed smiley's from the range of selectable emoticons in Group B. I still want them to still appear in existing posts on the board so removing them via FTP isn't an option, but I don't want people to add them until next Halloween or Christmas. So I go to Group B, and there is no option to remove them so that they can become un-assigned and available for future use.

I've looked at the documentation and it just says that when you upload a smiley into an add-on group, its automatically gets added to the default group also. Why is that? Should I use the Delete button in the default skin, or access group B via FTP and delete them physically?

Thanks if you can help!

[bfarber]

I've looked at the documentation and it just says that when you upload a smiley into an add-on group, its automatically gets added to the default group also. Why is that? Should I use the Delete button in the default skin, or access group B via FTP and delete them physically?

The reason is logical once you think about it more in depth.

Group A has emoticons X, Y and Z
Group B has emoticons U, V and W

Group A is assigned to Skin 1
Group B is assigned to Skin 2

(This is effectively what you are proposing you should be able to configure, and is indeed how it used to work a few years back).

User Joe is using Skin 1
User Steve is using Skin 2

User Joe makes a post using emoticon "X". It shows up fine. The link that is saved is something like "style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/x.gif". Because emoticons are linked per skin, at run time IPB determines what skin the user is using, and uses that emoticon directory, so Joe gets emoticon url "style_emoticons/group_a/x.gif", for instance.

User Steve is using Skin 2, however, so he gets url "style_emoticons/group_b/x.gif" - and it doesn't exist, causing a missing image to display.

If we saved the full url when the post is made, a user with a dark skin could quite likely end up with an image pointing to a light skin, and vice versa, making the emoticons look a lot "uglier" when used in combination with different skin types.

Unfortunately, as a result, you have to have the emoticons in all groups BUT you can have a different x.gif in each group.

[The Old Man]

Thanks for taking the time to explain this Brandon, much appreciated. I understand how it works now. I have in fact seen missing emoticons in some topics and I see now its because I don't have the same x.gif smiley in both groups. I also now understand the reasoning behind why an uploaded smiley gets put into both the chosen group and at the same time gets put automatically into the default group, as indeed it says it does in the manager.

As I understand it then, I'll have to just have one group with all the smilies in. Then if I want to remove say a Christmas smiley from the available list until next year, I can just use the delete option, so that its gone from their list of available emoticons but its still on the server and will display in older topics? Basically, all I want to do is to be able to switch seasonal smilies on and off when appropriate.

Many thanks again.