Chopper Bill (but for everyone),
I have it!
As many of us know, in a text fashion, smilies can be shown. A colon followed by a right parenthesis denotes a standard smile. Conversely, a colon followed by a left parenthesis denotes a standard sad or frowning face.
Other punctuation mark combinations denote other types of smilies.
With this (vBulletin) forum software, the same holds true. If you know the code, you can add smilies to your posts by using the proper combination of punctuation marks.
The other way to do this is to select from the 12 smilies listed in the Smilies menu to the right of the New Thread and Post Reply text boxes.
Now to the punch line I guess. There are 3 types of editor styles (basic, standard and enhanced) that each forum user can select from in their User Control Panel. If the Enhanced - WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is used, when you are a user creating a new thread or posting a reply to an existing thread, when you click on a smiley to insert it, you will see the smiley in the message as you type it. If you use the other 2 editors, you see the punctuation marks until you Preview or Submit the post.
Hope this helps demystify smilies a bit. If I have not fully addressed it, please let me know.
Thanks
Jim