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?

How to Post Graphic Smilies in Forums

The majority of today's forums using bbCode have their own graphic smilies that can be posted in messages.

I can't tell you what are the codes for smilies because of a simple fact that each forum has its own codes, but they shouldn't be difficult to add to your posts using advanced automated editors. Usually, you can see images of available smilies on those editors, to insert one into the message you're typing, you just click on its image & the code is inserted. There's maybe a link to a page containing more smileys & their codes. When you finish your posting & submit, smilies codes will be converted to graphic smilies.

The difference between the codes for smileys & others we saw previously, is that they don't contain tags. Smiles codes can be anything chosen by the forum administration, for example, a smiling face, could have the code ":)" or ":smile:", etc; a sad smile could have as code ":(" or ":sad:", etc. As I said it all depends on the community you post in, when you use the codes few times you'll most likely remember them & be able to type them manually in your messages.

Example:

Let's say the smiley has the code :smile: in the forum you're part of, if you type this:

Hello! Nice to be here! :smile:

The final message will look:

Hello! Nice to be here!

In the next post I'll tell you how to post smilies that are not present in the forum