I personally like the way it is now. I can be a little annoyed when I use a :D, and then a site replaces it with an emote that I feel does not exactly communicate what I had in mind when I typed it. *shakes a fist in the general direction of facebook* For me it's not so much a problem when I can preview the emotes I'm typing, but I generally like to have the option of typing :D without it converting to an image when I don't want it to.
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I'm moderator at a forum where I designed the emotes we use myself. I made two sets of emotes. r:D would show the laughing face of one set. m:D of the other, and :D just shows up as text. It's not really as intuitive as most sites, but personally I really like it that way.

But whatever Joris and Bella's decision on emoticons will be, I will no doubt adapt, as I have on countless other sites. So don't mind my little rant too much. :)

ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ RIOT ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ

A actually agree to Raizin, don't really like my :D turn into a yellow sphere..

r:D would show the laughing face of one set. m:D of the other, and :D just shows up as text.- Raizin

To me this feels like a good solution once you learned how to do it, but like you said: not most intuitive.

As i've mentioned on the Icon Emotes thread, I like the way Google does it in their chat system. They turn the :D 90 degrees so the face stands up. But we're always curious to other's opinions!

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Too many fun things to do with ascii. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Or just have like a dropdown menu next to the other buttons (bold, italic, underlined, etc) where you can select an emoticon if you want. :D

Yeah, the emotes don't have to be very intuitive to type if you can select them from a list. Since selecting an emote from a list often pastes the code for it in the text, you can then simply learn learn the codes of the ones you like to use most.

Since putting a word or letter between colons to get an emote is commonly used on various sites, codes that would be easy to remember once you learn the system might be :D: for :D, :P: for :P, :): for :), :3: for :3, etc.

And Lenc, stay classy, don't overdo it.
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the :D: syntax feels really good ! We'll add it in the description of the to-do! ^^: