Text-based smileys (emoticons) is a way to share your emotions by composing corrresponding images with printable characters. For example:

• :-) - smiling
• :-( - sad
• ;-) - winking
• :-P - showing tongue

Later, when Internet became accessible to everyone, fast and cheap, appeared popular web forums, where for the people, with a lack of imagination graphic smileys were introduced: corresponding text constructs were substituted with fancy icons.

• - smiling
• - sad
• - winking
• - showing tongue

This way of translating text into icons has a number significant deficiencies:

• To work correctly, it&s necessary to have the same emoticon set on the both sides. Otherwise, receiving side may have smileys either untranslated or translated not the way sender expects. This is exacerbated by the fact that many creators of emoticons do not have enough imagination to think up with a textual representation of the smiley, so they just write down some text, within asterisks "*" or colons ":": *DANCING*, *IN_LOVE*. The absence of any standardization can often lead to misunderstandings.
• It often happens that in the text there are combinations of symbols that the sender did not plan to turn into icons. This is especially true if it is discussed, for example, software development and users exchange fragments of program code.

To solve these problems, Emoji become more popular these days. However, despite all the above shortcomings, text-based emoticons remain very popular in our days.

In the basic package of eyeCU there are 2 sets of animated text emoticons: these are European Koloboks (Default) and Asian Kao Ani (Blobs Purple). The difference between the Asian text emoticons from the European ones is that they do not "lie on their side", like the European ones: (^_^) - smiling, (~_^) - winking. Such emoticons are popular in Japan, China, Korea and other Asian countries.

The format of emoticon sets is so simple that literally everyone can easily create their own set or extend an existing one, adding to it their own icons or text aliases for them.

In the newbie setting mode, you can only use one set of text emoticons at a time. This is done because many inexperienced users do not always realize what textual emoticons are and how they work. They do not understand that if you use several sets of text smileys at the same time, where the aliases intersect, the translator can not determine which set of appropriate smileys was selected from. Accordingly, if two users have multiple sets of text emoticons, then the recipient does not necessarily see the same picture that is displayed in the sender's client, even if the sets of both users are the same.

If you still want to use multiple sets of text smileys at the same time, select the advanced settings mode.