How do I use SMILIES in my posts and comments?

This tutorial will show you how to use smilies in your posts and comments.

Unlike most forums that many of us have previously used, there isn't a ready-made collection of smilies available to use when you make a post or add a reply.

However, this is not a problem because we are going to create our own smiley collection that we can use in R2.
Smilies are simply small images and can be added anywhere you can add an image using the little toolbar.

First of all, you need to create a folder on your computer.
Choose somewhere you can easily find when the browse dialog appears.

Choose from our large and fairly comprehensive collection of Emoticons to create your own collection at home:

• Emoticons 1
• Emoticons 2
• Emoticons 3
• Large Emoticons

Click on each individual smiley and when the full size version opens, right click on it and save to the folder you have created for the smilies.

The screenshots below will show you how to add a smiley when you post a comment, but the instructions are the same when you add a smiley to any post, discussion etc..anywhere you get the little toolbar in fact.

To add a comment: In the add comment text box, you will see a small toolbar at the top. Click on the little green image box at the end:

The add image dialog box opens:

We are going to upload an image from our computer, so click in the box as shown and browse to the folder where you have saved all the smilies and emoticons from our photo albums here on R2. You may also have some of your own that you might like to use.

Click on the image you want to use and then click Open in the file dialog box that appears:

If you click on the little arrow next to the word Options underneath, you can make changes depending on whether you want to wrap text round your image, create a thumbnail, place the image on the right and so on.
These are all quite useful options when adding large images to a page but are not relevant to us when adding a smiley, so we will just leave the defaults as shown and click Add. A small dialog box appears telling you not to close the browser while the upload is taking place and then your image appears.
It is just a link to it at the moment and will look quite odd...like this:

However when you click 'add comment' the link is automagically transformed to an image like this:

So there you are....you can now add smilies to your posts and comments.