Emoticons

Agreed. Definitely possible. Let me know if any particular faves aside from the obvious.

can you find a set of emocians wearing tramping packs?

Ha ha. I doubt it! Let me know if you see anything like that...

Just enabling GIFs or JPG in this reply script would be good. Might want to have a "Right Of Admission Reserved"-type proviso if you want to keep the site inoffensive ?. Otherwise, a selection box of approved icons to choose from when composing a reply. The FishnHunt.co.nz forum uses such. I believe that 'Facebook' site also has similar ?.

Ability to quote from previous posts would also be handy.

"ty to quote from previous posts would also" standard copy and paste always works add quotations manually as req

na it really doesn't work well when it comes to quoting multiple parties, other forums have a quote box and each separate quote has the authors name which just makes it read easier and look better And sometimes, as above here ^, the quote isn't even the full sentence...

"And sometimes, as above here ^, the quote isn't even the full sentence..." That was deliberate but maybe not wise. It is true that there are simpler more elegant ways of quoting but the point was that it can be done.

OK... On emoticons: my preference would be that you type symbols and they get swapped out with images... e.g. :-) . The reason is that the forum is currently all plain text and I'd like to keep it that way. I could switch to a rich text forum, but I'm not convinced that's a good idea. Plain text keeps things simple. On embedding images and quotes, one idea is to adopt the BBCode format. However, for images, it could simply be a matter of embedding the link to the image -- software can recognise an image link and replace it. I am tentatively in favour of that. I think adding BBCode for quotes, italics, bold, and lists, could be useful. I can add some helper buttons that make this easy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode Thoughts?