I hate them. A lot. I don't want to work at deciphering common text - if I wanted to solve a rebus puzzle, I'd find a book of them.

I added the functionality mostly because it was annoying that it wasn't working before (I mean, all of the db encodings and display page encodings were right, it SHOULD have worked)... but I find their use in general to be barely tolerable.

I assumed this was the case. I'm just giving you a hard time because... well, I don't really have a good reason. Well dang, this took me down a darker introspective road than I was hoping.

I really wasn't meaning to make anyone feel bad. I know some people enjoy this stuff, and I was annoyed that something that SHOULD have worked wasn't working. I also know that when you turn something like this on, it gets overused for a bit until people have had a little fun - and from then on it'll most likely be used much more sparingly.

I'm okay with all of that. I just have a personal dislike for the whole concept of emojis, always have. I simply don't feel like they add anything useful to the process of communication. (For every obvious symbol that saves you 5 or 10 typed characters, there are a hundred emojis that mean nothing to the uninitiated, or display too small to even make out.)

My complete repertoire:
:)
:(
;)