As designed Smilies parsing being done on parts of words

[AndyB]

Yet cause so many more.

It just isn't intuitive to change what has been internationally recognised smilies for nearly 20 years just because the software on very rare occasions converts text it shouldn't do into smilies.

Changing to :tongue does not prevent anyone from using the :p emoticon, just that it won't get converted to an image emoticon.

Hopefully this simple solution will help some forum owners.

 

[Alpha1]

Changing the syntax code for smilies is only a solution for new sites, but not for sites that have thousands or even millions of posts. Even if you teach thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users to use different syntax, then there still are a mass of posts using the old syntax. The solution does not lie in changing the syntax, but in changing the way its parsed.