My board uses tons of emoticons. Tons. Like, more than 99.99% of forums out there will. As such, the emoticon management screen was one of our favorite features of IPB over our old free forum software. The old software displayed each emoticon on its own line in the emoticon management screen, and in a seemingly completely arbitrary order, making it nigh impossible to use effectively because of the ridiculous amount of lines we'd have to go through (and Ctrl + F is extremely difficult to use because of how slow the page is). IPB 3.1.4, on the other hand, had a much more effective system: it had the emoticons laid out in an alphabetical grid, with pinned emoticons at the top, making it much easier, cleaner, and less space-consuming to go through.

Then we upgraded to 3.2. Overall, we love 3.2; it's a huge improvement over 3.1.4 in almost every way. Except the emoticon management screen. For some reason, the management decided to change the clean alphabetical grid method to the same horrible random-order each-emoticon-gets-its-own-line layout that drove us to leave our old forum software. Even worse, it loads the emoticons in a completely different random order every time you load the management page, which honestly makes it even more impossible to use than our old system, which at least kept the same crappy order each time. And frankly, I can't understand why it was even changed to begin with, because the new layout actually seems to have less functionality than the old one.

Why was it changed? Is there anyway to get the old system back?

Not even a staff response?

I'm with you on this one. Like a lot of communities, we use a lot of emoticons too. Generally, about 75-100 and it takes a lot of time (hours) for SOME FORUMS just to get the emoticons so users can use them!

3.2's emoticons management is a big bowl of not good.

Not a single word from the staff?

+1…

Since the time that we request improvements about the emoticons management… that should not be complicated for IPS to add a working re-order function…

I hope we'll not have to wait v3.3 or v4 to have this.

Re-ordering them is easy - it's how you important them ONE at a time that kills me.

+1…

Since the time that we request improvements about the emoticons management… that should not be complicated for IPS to add a working re-order function…

I hope we'll not have to wait v3.3 or v4 to have this.

Agreed; the feature is pretty much unusable right now.

I agree with doing something different with the way these are managed. Very few things I want changed, this is one of them.

I have not upgraded some of our larger sites that use a lot of emoticons because it's such a pain in the ass - painstakingly long process.

It would be great to have a word about that problem (yeah, it's really a problem) from IPS Staff… please :smile:

Sorry to keep bumping this, but at least an acknowledgement by the staff would be fantastic.

Keep bumping it - the emoticon management is horrible.

If I was a first time user with 3.2, I'd wonder how this got approved. IPS will get it right with a mix of 3.1 and 3.2. . .hopefully soon.

Even if the staff don't reply, doesn't mean they haven't acknowledged your posts.

The emoticon system sucks. It's a total pain to go through and edit them, even in the admin screen everytime the page loads they all randomize positions. They are laid out horribly in the post screens as well, you'd think you'd have the ones that were clickable and ones that weren't again. Or be able to pin the default ones to the default that shows up when people hit the emot button.

This area definitely needs work, very frustrating.

But that is one of the very few things I dislike about IPB.

Sorry to bump this again, but I really want to make sure it was noticed because i just had to add a few new emoticons today and the experience was terrible. In addition to the one-emoticon-a-line display (in which the option to move them up and down means nothing because refreshing the page randomizes the order again anyway), a number of unassigned emoticons in reality are assigned, and removing emoticons seems to randomly remove different ones from the one you selected. This system is terrible. What was wrong with the old one?