Smilies

A guestbook is a friendly place, and a smilie often says what a sentence cannot. UltraGuest has offered them since the early days, and they are switched on for every new guestbook.

How they work

When smilies are enabled, the sign form shows a row of 19 small pictures under the message box: smile, big grin, wink, laughing, sad, crying, confused, cool, embarrassed, rolling eyes, tongue out, idea, thumbs up, thumbs down and a few more. A click inserts the smilie's short code, such as :) or ;), where the cursor is, and visitors who know the codes can simply type them. When the message is saved, each code becomes its picture, and the guestbook page shows it in place.

Text with a little formatting

Smilies are the only pictures a guestbook message contains. Visitors cannot upload images or files, and HTML typed into a message is shown as plain text, which keeps pages small and safe. What they can do is write up to 1,500 characters, keep their line breaks, and use simple tags for bold ([b]), italic ([i]), underline ([u]) and lists ([list] with [*] items).

In your notification e-mails

If you have e-mail notifications switched on, the message arrives with the smilies written as their text codes rather than as pictures, so the mail needs no remote images and looks right in every inbox.

Turning them off

Prefer plain text? Untick Enable Smilies under Settings › Guestbook Options. From then on a typed :) stays exactly as typed and the row of pictures disappears from the sign form. Messages posted earlier keep their smilies.

Matching your design

The smilies are small GIF images that sit inside the message text, so they work with any colour scheme you choose under Design › Colors and Style, and with your own stylesheet if you use custom CSS. See customize for the design options, or try them on the demo guestbook.