Your opinion on our smilies

[doctorwayne]

I agree with railohio. Get ride of them all. They make it hard for some people to read the posts when they are jumping around. If you make a dumb or negative comment these things do not make a negative into a positive. I have no idea what most of these useless things are supposed to mean and do not have the time to try and find out what they mean each time. It takes a lot of time to keep up with all the posts on here. If you do not have anything helpful or constructive to say don't say anything at all. Sarcasm and joking around are neither of these and are a waist of time in my opinion.

I disagree: smilies can ameliorate what might otherwise be interpreted as mean-spirited, and add nuances to the written words. We don't, for the most part, speak in monotones or without facial expressions and even body movements. Those things express our attitudes towards both the subject matter and those being addressed, but are otherwise missing from words written here.
In this day and age, when many cannot communicate in fully-spelled out words or express their thoughts coherently, it's easy to mistake their true intentions. While the Members here are among the most cordial I've seen on-line, there are occasions where someone appears to overstep the bounds of propriety when the judicious use of a smilie could have changed the tone of the remark completely, better reflecting what the poster had intended to say.
There's a time for joking around, and I can't see that humour should out of place here: I take the hobby as seriously as anyone here, but even that is funny in itself...grown men (and women) playing with trains. We should always be capable of laughing at ourselves, and of laughing with our friends.
As for sarcasm, I find it to be one of the most effective ways to communicate verbally without being overtly offensive, yet it's often lost in on-line exchanges without a smilie to qualify it....mind you, there are those on whom both would be wasted.

Wayne