Does disabling emoticons stop legit char. combos becoming emoticons?

[DavidHertzberg]

This post is a testbed for a suggestion made by Support for Case #52200.  The following paragraph is the test case, taken from the second sentence in the third substantial paragraph of this 24 March 2016 post:

 

So the answer to your Question 1) is B] (which I must write that way because—thanks to a 'peculiarity' in the Retrospect Forums software—if I write it as 'b' or 'B' followed by ')' it gets turned into this smiley—as happened in your post).

 

The result of implementing the suggestion "Have you tried to uncheck the 'Enable emoticons?' option to the right side of the posting field that appears when you select 'more reply options'?" is that unchecking the option stops ' B)' from being turned into an emoticon when the first edit is saved.  However, if I do a further edit on the same post, using the full editor so as to verify that the "Enable emoticons" icon is turned off, the ' B)' that was already in the post shows as an emoticon in the editor—although it does not show as an emoticon when the further edit is saved.

 

I am entering this post using Safari 10.0.1 on my Early 2011 MacBook Pro, under OS X 10.10.5. 

 

P.S.: Revised third paragraph; I got confused between the contents of the edit window and what is saved from it when doing the test last night.

[DavidHertzberg]

Let's take a reasoned look at the post that started this conversation.  Dealing with a tricky problem under circumstances (the spam tsunami) that made us all nervous, in the second paragraph I made a serious suggestion that might be considered controversial enough that I prefaced the suggestion with a joke.  The joke was far-out enough that it needed to be accompanied by a smiley, but I knew the forums software would not allow me to use a smiley.  So I followed the joke with the parenthetical gibe about derek500.  As I made clear two posts below that post in the same thread, the gibe was solidly based on a remark derek500 had actually posted 9 months before.

 

I truly have the greatest respect for derek500.  He has made many solid posts to these forums, especially back last winter when he revealed an undocumented feature of the Console Scripts category panel Summary detail pane that solves a problem I had been struggling with for nearly 6 months.  However I continue to think that derek500's 25 March 2016 remark was not very perceptive.

 

In the future I will use a different parenthetical remark, such as "(insert appropriate smiley here)".  The last sentence of the first paragraph of this post is another another place where I would have preferred to use a smiley.  What brian163 wants is for Retrospect Inc. to build in and test compatibility with every company's non-standard cloud storage format, all so he wouldn't have to download a trial copy of Mountain Duck and pay US$40 if it works for him.  I could have made a very scathing comment to that effect, but it seemed kinder to make a joke about about "any 15GB of cloud storage ... hypothetical cat—who may be named Larry Page or Sergey Brin—may have dragged in".

 

So I need to be able to insert smilies in my helpful posts, but in the same posts I may also need to be able to enumerate procedural steps.  That's why I want the forums software to be fixed to make it possible to do both simultaneously—which the first post in this thread shows now can't be done.  Since—as I pointed out in this post—Retrospect Inc. seems to have upgraded its forums software coincident with running into the spam tsunami, I think that should be feasible.