Smileys are small graphical icons which you can insert into your messages to convey an emotion or feeling, such as a joke or embarrassment. For example, if you entered a sarcastic comment, rather than type 'that was a joke', you could simply insert the 'wink' smiley.

If you have used email or internet chat systems, you will probably be familiar with the concept of smileys already. Certain combinations of text characters are converted into smileys. For example, :) is converted into a smiling face. To understand smiley codes, tilt your head to the left and look at the text: you will see that :) represents two eyes and a smiling mouth.

On occasions, you may want to prevent the text in your message being converted into smileys. You will see a checkbox which you can select when you make a new post, which will allow you to 'disable smileys'.