Emoticons
Emoticons are a great way to spice up your content and allow you to convey more meaning and emotion than the text alone...
What Are Emoticons?
Emoticons are little images that are used to convey particular meaning.
Using Emoticons
The following emoticons are provided and are easy to add in to your content:
| Wiki Notation |
Emoticon |
Common Meaning |
Wiki Notation |
Emoticon |
Common Meaning |
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Happy |
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Sad / Unhappy |
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Cheeky |
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Really Happy / Excited |
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Wink |
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Question / Help |
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Yes / Thumbs Up |
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No / Thumbs Down |
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Tick / Correct |
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Cross / Incorrect |
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Warning / Important |
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Information |
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Subtract / Disadvantage |
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Add / Advantage |
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Idea |
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No Idea |
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Yellow Star |
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Red Star |
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Blue Star |
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Green Star |
You can add the emoticons anywhere 
simply by entering the wiki notation in to your content.
Escaping Emoticons
Sometimes emoticons will appear where you don't want them to, especially if you are inserting mathematical equations or source code.
There are two key ways to disable emoticons in your content...
For normal content, "escape" the text by placing a backslash ("\") character inside the text that's turning in to an emoticon as follows:
Resulting in: :) vs.
For blocks of code (especially Java, JavaScript and ActionScript), use the code macro or noformat macro.
Hints and Tips
Use emoticons to create custom bulleted lists or set the tone for text that might otherwise be read incorrectly.
There are some in-built panel macros that use these icons - for more information see the tip macro, info macro, note macro and warning macro.
Frequently Asked Questions
| Q |
Can I add my own emoticons and smileys? |
| A |
No. However, adding Images to your pages is really easy! |
Added by
I am trying the backslash("\") char to get normal content instead of smiley. When i save my page for the first time its fine but next time when i am again editing the page (and not touching the smiley part) the escape char is removed automatically and i am getting the image instead.
Any idea?
I assume you are using the Rich Text Editor ... the simplest solution would be to suggest you don't!
Unfortunately we don't have that much experience with the RTE, instead we prefer to work directly with the wiki markup - takes a bit more time to get used to, but has many pay offs.
Atlassian may have a more information on the RTE and I would suggest consulting the Atlassian Confluence User mailing list for advice.
No I am using the wiki editor only not the RTE
Interesting, which version of Confluence are you on?
I am on "confluence-2.2.9-std"
One more thing which i had noticed; when I am trying to get an uploaded image displayed in a page using "Unable to render embedded object: File (imagename.gif) not found." I am not getting the same as an escape backslash is getting appended to it.
In all I facing avery strange scenario. Place where I want an escape to work is not working and the place where I didn't want an escape there its coming!
At the risk of sounding like a party pooper, I really wish there was a way to turn these things off.
Confluence is meant to be an enterprise class wiki, not cheesey forum software for pre-teens.
A bunch of my server documentation has stupid smilies in it, because the MAC Addresses contain one or more ":\D" sequences.
I would like a way to selectively disable these emoticons, rather than having to back-quote or wrap text in otherwise pointless macros.
This is the sign of a larger problem I see in confluence. The WYSIWYG editor just doesn't cut it, not by a long shot. So everyone here has to always work in Wiki Markup view (I actually prefer it, but many of our users would be happier in WYSIWYG). But the wiki markup is too simplified for its own good. As a result, we have to be constantly backslash-quoting text to prevent it being interpreted as wiki markup.
eg. * isn't a bad choice for bold. neither is - for strike through. Or _ etc.
The problem is the use of a single character to enable this formatting. Single characters happen a lot. It would be better to have used say, double characters to start/stop formatting.
Similarly Confluence tables are too simplified to be useful. MediaWiki tables are much much better, though they are fiddlier to do manually.
Just my 2c
/\ndy
By the way:
Confluence 2.5.2
:\D doesn't work. The backslash is being rendered.
So I am seeing: Colon Backslash capital-D
/\ndy
What if you put the backslash in front of the colon? I think there's a user macro on confluence.atlassian.com which can be used in worst case scenarios to stop text being wiki rendered.
Yeah, I kind of agree.
Emoticons in Confluence need to be more configurable in general. I would like to see the ability to customise the emoticon library (add, change, delete) as this would solve some very common requests:
You might like to join the discussion here: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-3698
As for the rich text editor, it really helps with adoption in many organisations and teams. Personally I hate it - it hinders my ability to populate the wiki and it messes up my nice clean wiki notation. You can at least disable the wiki notation editor (as we've done on this site) but in organisations where some people like it and some people don't you end up with the rich text people messing up the notation of pages made by the wiki notation people.
With regards to text formatting, the only thing that bugs me is the use of _ for italic - it should be a / and then use _ for underline! I don't mind escaping stuff as it's not a problem I run in to regularly (and I've added thousands of pages to this wiki).
Confluence tables need at least colspan capability. There's a huge discussion on various approaches that could be taken and we'd really appreciate your input and vote: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-3808
I've got gripes about several things in Confluence, but only because I use it so much and love it. I can't imagine what I'd do without Confluence.
I wholeheartedly agree, the WYSIWYG editor definitely isn't up to snuff, considering what is out there in blogging tools like WordPress. And the table markup isn't very full-featured either. Don't get me wrong, I like Confluence but its got a couple areas to improve a lot in.
Atlassian are apparently working on a much improved rich text editor, however until they switch to using XHTML (rather than wiki notation) for content storage, it's still going to be a bit flakey IMHO. The move to XHTML is decidedly non-trivial (an engineer term for understating the extreme complexity of a task).
There are now other methods of editing pages, for example the Office Connector which allows editing using MS Word and other similar products.
As for tables, the current workaround (albeit long-winded) is to use the table macro and associated macros - these are macro representations of the table elements found in HTML so give lots of flexibility (column spans, etc) but obviously need more effort than doing a basic table.