Smilies.

[bilbous]

There is already a mechanism proscribing a name like Uber-l33t in the character creation process and the argument has little to do with smilies in the chat interface. One can normally assume that a general statement  as

You do your thing, and the non-RPers will do their thing--no rules required in either direction

in a thread are in the context of the thread. Perhaps what the RPee-ers should do is pretend smilies are strange magical glyphs with unobservable effects. Or pretend you are Amazonian chieftains seeing nothing but sea out there where the ships are.

Perhaps we should forbid any marriages without a valid license, those things are generally cheesy, frequently abuse the rules about painting the landscape with items just for show and take away from people interacting with the npc's in the vicinity. Further we should outlaw any RP in which the participants step out of character to castigate bystanders for not respecting the integrity of the RP. I'm not actually suggesting these measures, I'm just saying these things go both ways and few people are blameless.

[Vengeance]

It seems to me that the logical conclusion of "Perhaps what the RPee-ers should do is pretend smilies are strange magical glyphs with unobservable effects" is non-sensical.  Maybe people should see typing and just respond "I can't hear you" because it isn't audible?  If "lol" and "m8" are also annoying, should we outlaw all abbreviations and contractions?  Typing is a required compromise because of the limitations of technology and abbreviations are a way to minimize the intrusion, afaic.

To whoever said that I was the one who needed to relax here, keep in mind that I got both of these responses to my post:  "I think you will find that rules are required" and "I really don't see why any rules should be made on this".  Most of the thread is discussing rules or filters.  I have no problem with filters.

Regarding the filters, probably the filter is converting the typed text to all lowercase before attempting to find a match, so "" will *never* be found in your file, but ":d" will probably work.  If a helpful soul could try it and post the results here, others might find it useful.

Thanks.

[Volund]

Take a chill pill, everyone. I bet what bothers people with "" is that they are afraid that that will turn this game into a "Im gonna pwn your ass noob", like said, at some point our limitations in technology reach the best Roleplay we can give the game.

[Under the moon]

Vengeance, yes, :d works as a filter for both :D and :d. I would not have thought of that. :P :D xD :O and others can be added now as well.