Smiley Fix (stupid tip of the day, part one)

[Wildcat Media]

For years on phpBB2, any time someone would write in a set of numbers in parentheses that ended in the number 8, it would trigger one of our smileys. The 8 and ) characters together made our "cool" smiley, with sunglasses. This bit me on a forum today as I had entered a catalog number as (80058) and got the little dude wearing the shades.

In XF, I found I could fix this easily. Since most smileys are separated by spaces (or should be), I simply entered the smiley code as " 8)" in the smiley database, putting a space before the eight. I think phpBB trimmed any whitespace before or after the smiley code, so it never worked. Fortunately it works here! It fixes something that has bugged us for, what, nine years now?

 

[Onimua]

You can also use [plain] tags if you want to void smiley usage. :)

 

[Wildcat Media]

For one isolated smiley, it's not worth it.

vBulletin always pulled a trick on us. We had a "popcorn" smiley for when things got....interesting in a thread:

The code for it was :popcorn:, but vB was greedy with the interpretation and made a smiley out of the :p portion of the code...so you'd have the smiley followed by the letters "opcorn". We ended up changing the code to something different.