I was trying to type the number 48 inside parentheses and it came out like this.
(measure 48). The little smiley face with the sunglasses is supposed to be another parenthesis. I didn't type it like that. Isn't that weird?

I have had a few frustrating moments where I needed to type an eight followed by a paranthesis and it came out as a sunglassed-smiley face. Is there some way to turn that off?

A little background on smilies...

All smilies have friendly keyboard abbreviations like 8) which automatically turns into the 'Cool' smilie. The complete list is shown in the attached image if you're interested.

If you do not want this, tick the checkbox 'Disable Smilies in this post' beneath the message input area (as I did for this post hence you do not see the smilie). This means however that you can have no smilies at all in this post, not even using the icons. You can also disable smilies altogether in your profile. Bit boring really...

Some smilie translations, especially this one, are really irritating, and we could remove these from the translation table if you people want it so that you can use smiles and yet type .

When you make a post, just mark the box underneath the post window saying "Disable BBCode in this post" and there will be no smileys.

Nope, that doesn't stop them. Even with HTML and BBCode both disabled, phpbb still translates the 8) to a Cool smiley. You really have to click 'Disable Smilies in this post' to get rid of it.

Disabling BBcode breaks things like quoting, italic, etc, so I would not recommend that.
When unsure, use Preview to see what it will look like once posted.

Why don't you change the hotkey of into (H) [just like MSN]? That's much easier and doesn't have those problems .

and how are hotkeys changed? Because some non-MSN users (like me) are computer dumb

Yeah I think I will change it. Got bitten by it myself in the beginning. Chances you'd want to type (H) are rather small.


Lol-nl, it is changed in the forum administration here, nothing the users need to do for it.

That particular smiley reminds me of comme_le_vent and his gang of speed demons.

X_X