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: https://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.
