User blog:Drew1200/Emoticon Announcements!

I'm going to make several announcements on this blog, so pay attention!

Emoticon Contest
Last month, I announced the emoticon contest. It went really well, and we had some awesome entries. The judges have made their picks, so here's the results!

Legofanyoda
Thanks to everyone who entered. There were some really great emotes that did not end up getting picked. Don't worry, though. If we have another emote contest again in the future, you can enter those emotes again!

If you're interested in testing out these new emotes, head over to the test wiki chat. They're live there! We won't be adding them to this chat just yet, but you can expect that in the future.

Emoticon Voting
If you haven't noticed yet, our current emote list is a complete mess. There's hundreds of emotes there, many of which are never used, or make no sense. I'm working on clearing these out, but instead of just doing it myself, I've opened it up for you guys to vote on. Here's a link.

Each emote (or group of emotes) has it's own page. If you're interested, you can go ahead and vote on any of them you want. If an emote doesn't have sufficient support, then it will be removed. Please note, though, that this only applies to the user requested emotes. All of the ones from the contest, or LMBs do not count. They will be kept either way.

Emote Refresh
We've been using the new emotes on the main space for pretty close to a year now. Despite that, we've continued to use the old emotes on chat. I know a lot of you aren't going to be excited about this announcement, but I think it will still be for the better. Starting within the next 2 weeks, we will have the new emotes set as default in chat. The old ones will still be available by placing brackets around the emote like this: [:)], or through a variety of other methods. (i.e. ;P =P (tonguesmiley o), etc.).

Again, I doubt there will be much excitement for this announcement, but they're really not all that bad. If you'd like to preview it, here's the link to our test chat again. (link) I think the new emotes will be really easy to get used to, and with the new awesome emotes from the contest, I think it could even be pleasurable! Please, just no flame wars or riots in the comments.

So I think that's it for emoticon announcements right now! I hope you guys will enjoy the updates.