A client wants forums with automatic conversion of smiley symbols , etc. to small images. Any objections if that becomes an optional functionality of forums?

I would make it a package parameter (off by default) that triggers a simple regsub on pages that display messages with a few predefined patterns plus some small image files beneath forums/www/graphics/. Would it be ok to include the images in the toolkit, or should they be downloadable optionally?

Any suggestions for already existing patterns and images that could be re-used? (I thought about looking into gaim, but if there's a place that doesn't require wading through C code then I'd prefer that)

TkChat (the GUI client for the Tcl'ers Wiki Chat) has a large number of emoticons (inlined base-64 encoded in .tcl) which should be simpler to grok than gaim's C code. 

See http://wiki.tcl.tk/tkchat

Please add this sooner rather than later. People realy like this. also not this is default on all modern systems like msn messenger, so you can't do without it, how trivial it may seem.
Cheers
Ben

Frank, thanks for the links - unfortunately I have already added the icons from gaim for now, because they seem to be most complete and homogenous, although maybe a little too large for some layouts (19x19 png's). If you have time to wade through those sites, make sure that the copyright is ok and put together a collection of some smaller smileys, go ahead

(but please no animated ones - that's over the top IMHO)

The patch is here: http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/patch?patch_number=4

The tcl command 'string map' is very useful indeed for this purpose. Currently the code does simply replace _all_ occurences of smiley patterns with the corresponding img tags - I wonder if there are going to be collisions with text that is not intended as emoticon, e.g. stuff inside of html tags. I left out the more likely patterns such as :) and :( to be a bit safer here.

Tilmann, I will try to see what I can find of smileys with a proper and useful copyright. If my initial search is any indication, then I will have to luck out and find something claiming to be a canonical smiley collection from someone like the original author.

Many, but apparently not all, of the 15x15s on the two sites mentioned are also found in vBulletin, a commercial package, though who came up with them is anyone's guess.

Animated gifs are hugely popular on sites that have them. I happen to like them too.

Frank.

can we add them to openacs.org?
it would be a neat feature to show off

Janine, I don't like them either and my vote is not to switch them on for openacs.org, too

Vadim, that would solve the problem but it involves an additional column in the forums messages table which is a bit more of a change then I planned to make.

Vadim,

it's now in cvs, and activated both for html and plain text postings (if you set the parameter to 1). I suppose not doing the conversion in html mode would cause some confusion for the users who expect that behaviour, and emoticons won't  be switched on in forums with lots of technical discussion anyway so I think that's going to be ok.