However, this whole thing does give me an idea about the story-telling with emoticon issue. While I can't possibly offer every variation on the editor, if we wanted to have a thread of story telling with these, perhaps I could build a web page with a huge variety of these things that would be hosted here on site, and then in that section, people could insert the URLs for an endless number of these. Since each file would be pre-checked, no worries about "where has this file been," etc.
Wow, Phillip, that sounds like a perfect solution to reviving our beloved Rebus thread. I'm sure everyone would have a ball with that! You certainly have my vote to go ahead with it.
Would we be able to use all those smileys in our regular posts, or just in one area?
I agree with you also about keeping the images in sig lines to a reasonable size. In this case, bigger is not necessarily better, since they can get distracting when seen in post after post.
The Cowboy emoticons are perfect for our Brokeback site, so I would vote along with David for installing them in place of the ones we have now. However, if it turns out we can't use the extra smileys you mentioned above in our posts, it might be worth approaching the author of the Cowboy smilies, Andrea Hubacher, with ideas for more of them, like angel, devil, crazy, hearts-for-eyes, smoking, etc.
Here is what it says on Andrea Hubacher's site (the link Celeste posted) regarding copyright:
Please be aware that the smiley sets on this web site are under the copyright protection by the author. You are allowed to use the smiley set as permanent or seasonal standard smiley set in your own YaBB board. You are not allowed to re-distribute or modify the smileys without written permission by the author. Using the smileys obliges you to give credit to the author and provide a back link to the YaBB Board Smiley Sets website (f.e. announcement thread or credits page). Only use on non profit sites is permitted. Furthermore it is not allowed to use these smiley sets on any site containing vulgar, racist, sexistic, obscene or adult material. Do not download or use these smileys if you do not agree to these conditions. There is no mention on the site of paying to use the smileys, so I think they are free as long as we meet the copyright terms.