I hate smileys

[William Barnes]

I am so tired of seeing smileys in every piece of code which is posted. Can't the default be no smiles, and you have to check the box to use them?

[Ken Loh]

Is there some sort of escape characters we can use ? E.g. "\" :

<c\ :-o	 ut value="Don't turn me into another smiley pppplllllleeeeaaaassssee!"/>

[ April 06, 2005: Message edited by: Ken Loh ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

There's a checkbox on the message entry screen labelled "Disable smilies in this post" (scroll down to find it.) Check it, and no smilies.

[Ken Loh]

I think that's exactly what the original-post sender didn't want. It's easy for one to forget to check the box. He wanted it to be checked as a default.

However, checking the box would dissappoint those who want both intact codes and smileys.

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
There's a checkbox on the message entry screen labelled "Disable smilies in this post" (scroll down to find it.) Check it, and no smilies.

[Steven Bell]

While I don't think this is something possible with the current forum software it would make sense to not allow smilies within code tags and/or have a tag such as [nosmiley] that leaves text within it alone.

[Jim Yingst]

I'm not sure how possible it is with the current software. There may be an option in our control panel - or I might be able to hack the code. Assuming it's possible: does this sound like a good idea to everyone? Personally I think it makes sense. I use smilies all the time, but I'm willing to have to toggle a checkbox on my posts in order to do so. I think there's probably more damage done to posts containing code which is now incorrectly interpreted as smilies, than there would be damage done to posts which try to use smilies, and they just get the individual ASCII characters. (Most of which are still understood as smilies by other humans, after all.) Is there a compelling reason not to make the default "no smilies" as William suggests?

[Paul Sturrock]

does this sound like a good idea to everyone?

+1 vote.

The implications of adding etc. to a post seems to pass new users by completely as the site currently behaves. And most people seem to assume the implied promise of code tags for example is that they will preserve the original formatting. So its usually a surprise to see smilies where you expected a JDBC url.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Sure would be nice if they could just be blocked inside code tags, though. I'm not a huge smiley user, but this would be an extra step when I did use one.

Here's a potentially radical idea: there are only a very few smilies that cause this problem:

;) :p

What if we gave them all a nose:

:-) :-( :-D ;-) :-p

Those never come up in Java code (although they're probably meaningful in Perl!)

Looking at the control panel, though, it seems that code-hacking would be required to do this; UBB won't let you change the text for these "built-in" smilies from the control panel.

[Jim Yingst]

Changing the smilies is an interesting idea, but I'm guessing it would be too complex. The main problem is, how to get this to work with existing posts and new ones? The existing posts still have standard smilies like : ) (without the space of course). The UBB code that renders posts as HTML would have to decide whether to interpret a post using old or new rules. Might work if we just look at a timestamp. Or we could run some huge batch job that transforms all the old post files into a new format. Possible, but it's sounding rather icky to me.

I like the idea of simply turning off smilies inside [ code ] tags. Would require a little Perl hacking, but probably a lot less than other solutions, and I think it would be straightforward for our users.

Of course, there are a couple other things I should really tackle first. Like tracking down where our bulk e-mailer is getting those old addresses from... And some bonehead user managed to screw up his profile page somehow; need to look into that.

[Bear Bibeault]

Disabling them inside code tags is a great idea -- just wish more people would actually use the code tags.

Obviously this is a big issue for the JSP forum where phrases like <c:out> appear with great frequency.

Adding noses to the smiley codes is also a good idea -- you would think that there's a translation table somewhere, but I don't know how it was actually implemented.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I agree that giving the smilies a nose is a good idea. What I don't see is why you have to make it backward compatible? Old format smilies could just be written as plain text smilies. My real question with the smilies is how to people know to type them with a nose? I never actually click the instant graemlins button; smilies just appear when typing : ).

Either approach (noses or disabling in code tags) would certainly be an improvement over what we have now though.

[Jason Menard]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
Disabling them inside code tags is a great idea -- just wish more people would actually use the code tags.

I feel your pain.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Wonder if it's possible to write a script or something that automatically detects code and inserts code tags where needed (along with a scalding hot message to the poster about doing his own code tags in the future)

[Ryan McGuire]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:

What if we gave them all a nose:

:-) :-( :-D ;-) :-p

Those never come up in Java code

How about this (contrived) example:

    return (o>=) ? ((p>=0)?((D>=0)?((p>=D)?p-D :-( p-D)) :-D ) :-p ) :-o ;

...would end up looking like...

    return (o>=) ? ((p>=0)?((D>=0)?((p>=D)?p-D     :(      p-D))     :mrgreen:     )     :-P	     )     :-o	     ;

(although they're probably meaningful in Perl!)

Ouch, I'd be insulted on behalf of all Perl users if this weren't true.

Ryan
[ April 07, 2005: Message edited by: Ryan McGuire ]

[Bear Bibeault]

 How about this (contrived) example: 

Very contrived, and unlikely to show up in real code. Point is, adding the "noses" would prevent 99% of the non-contrived cases where smilies show up unintentionally in code examples.

[Jeroen Wenting]

but then a lot of the things posted here look quite contrived even if they're genuine attempts

[Ryan McGuire]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault

Very contrived, and unlikely to show up in real code. Point is, adding the "noses" would prevent 99% of the non-contrived cases where smilies show up unintentionally in code examples.

Point is, why use any patterns that could possibly show up in valid code? (Or why expand smilies in a CODE block at all?)

Also, I disagree with your 99% estimate. The only difference between "colon p" and "colon negative p" in a chunk of code is the inclusion of a negative for the third term of a ?: expression. In the battle between "(p<0)?-p:p" and "(p>=0)?p:-p", I could definitely see the latter hapenning more than 1% of the time. In fact, if we use my code as a test case we're more likely to see the latter construct (including the lack of spaces), so adding minuses to smily patterns would actually make the problem worse (for that particular smily).

Ryan
[ April 08, 2005: Message edited by: Ryan McGuire ]

[Ben Souther]

Removing all smilies from within code blocks is going to be a lot more work (on a product that we don't maintain) whereas adding the nose is a small quick hack that can eliminate the vast majority of unintended smilies.

Sounds like a good start to me.

[Jim Yingst]

I still prefer disabling smilies in code blocks. Many people will still omit code blocks, and their code will still look like crap. But that has little to do with smilies, and they can always add code tags later. Meanwhile there are other similar problems we could solve, like the fact that using the variable name i as an array index often gets interpreted as an italics tag. And < often creates problems. I don't want to create custom new syntaxes for these - they already exist, actually, but they're a pain to use. Disabling most forms of UBB interpretation inside code tags seems like a good approach here. Though there will probably be some problems with backwards compaptibility as alluded to earlier - but as Jeanne suggests, we can probably live with some mild goofiness in old posts.
[ April 08, 2005: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by Ryan McGuire:
How about this (contrived) example

Wow, you've got a devious brain!

I admit that I forgot about the ternary operator in considering possible valid character sequences in Java. Hmm. Maybe a "." for a nose...

I think Jim's right, though -- there are other things that go wrong with code tags, and simply turning off UBBCode inside of them could potentially fix them all.

[Adeel Ansari]

I also vote for disabling smilies inside "code" tag. It would become effective to all previous posts as well. Like when we change our signatures, it changes to all our previous posts as well. Like the no of posts automatically updated in all the previous posts.

Moreover, we have to discourage the codes without code tag, indeed.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

If we end up disabling smilies in code tags, can we do it for url tags as well. It doesn't come up as often, but just often enough to be mildly annoying.

[Shailesh Chandra]

Can't there be a simple javascript code,the moment I click on "CODE" button it would enable the checkbox of "Disable smilies in this post"

Or

We can check same before posting FORM if content contains any [CODE] tag then It would make checkbox value true so that smiley in same post are disabled. even this case would be better as it would handle [CODE] tag directly typed by keyboard

Shailesh
[ April 16, 2005: Message edited by: Shailesh Chandra ]

[Jim Yingst]

[Jeanne]: If we end up disabling smilies in code tags, can we do it for url tags as well. It doesn't come up as often, but just often enough to be mildly annoying.

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Can you give an example?

[Shailesh]: Can't there be a simple javascript code,the moment I click on "CODE" button it would enable the checkbox of "Disable smilies in this post"

I suppose that sould be possible, but I'd prefer not to disable smilies outside of code tags for no reason. Moreover as discussed previously the problem is not just smilies; it includes other UBB markup as well. I wouldn't want to disable all markup outside code tags - but I think it does make sense to disable it within code tags.

The same reply applies to your second suggestion.

[Shailesh Chandra]

but I'd prefer not to disable smilies outside of code tags for no reason.

Point taken my thought was that If today I submit a post with code and if I want to disable smiley then I would select the checkbox to disable smile and that would also disable smiley outside of code tags for no reason

Shailesh

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
[Jeanne]: If we end up disabling smilies in code tags, can we do it for url tags as well. It doesn't come up as often, but just often enough to be mildly annoying.

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Can you give an example?

If I post this without disabling similies in the post, it displays as a bunch of text with a happy face (and not as a link)
[URL=http://www.google.com/search?q=javaranch&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US fficial]JavaRanch link from Google[/URL]
[ April 17, 2005: Message edited by: Jeanne Boyarsky ]

[Alan Moore]

Here's an idea: don't interpret a character sequence as a smiley if the sequence is immediately preceded or followed by another non-whitespace character. That's a lot easier than determining whether or not the characters are inside a certain kind of tag, and it would also work on naked URLs (naked code, too, come to think of it). And it shouldn't break the formatting of existing posts because the forum software has always padded smileys with spaces (of course, it wouldn't need to do that anymore). You might try it as an interim fix while you work on a more complete one (i.e., disabling other tags within CODE segments).