Insert Your Smilies in Posts

You can insert your own smilies in your messages from your hard disk or other forums. You would like to do that, if the forum do not have some emoticons that fit certain occasions or if it doesn't contain smilies at all.

In fact graphic smilies are just small pictures, if they are associated with some special codes in the forum (":)" or ":(" for example) they get shown in posts by typing those codes. But if they don't have those codes, they still can be inserted same way as images, i.e. using the [img] tag.

Steps to post external smilies:

First, you need a hyper-link for your smiley, if it's already on the Internet (on another forum for example), it has already a hyper-link that you could copy to later put in your post; if the image (smiley) is on your computer, upload it to an images host to get a link for it. We already saw the two methods in detail when we talked about images. See this: Methods to Get Images Links.

Now that you have the URL (hyper-link) for your smiley, you just have to wrap the link with the [img] tag & you're done (for more details see: Intro on [img] tag & Hyper-links).

Example:

I uploaded a smiley to PhotoBucket, and here's its hyper-link:

http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee88/learn-bbcode/smile.gif

Now let's wrap it with the [img] tag:

[img]http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee88/learn-bbcode/smile.gif[/img]

Once you have that code you can insert it anywhere in your message, it's much longer than usual smiles codes but the result is the same:

Hi! [img]http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee88/learn-bbcode/smile.gif[/img] Howdy?

Would look:

Hi! Howdy?