tampa tech solutions

 I found myself on #phpbb over at irc.freenode.net and was greeted by Leviathan21 who immediately wanted to help me.
 
You see, I'm responsible for a local Poker forum (www.angryjacks.com/forums) and in order to make a cool experience, I decided to use "smilies" that look like playing cards.  This way you can post a hand online and see a graphical representation of the hand instead of just reading "2h" for the 2 of hearts.
 
Well, the inherent issue with this is that "As" is the ace of spades and Th is the ten of hearts.  Now people's regular posts are peppered with playing card icons and I hate it. 
 
After considering the removal of said icons, I figured they were more useful than painful.  So, the easiest way was to have smilies automatically disabled when you post, but enabling you to uncheck if you want to put cool smilies in your post(s).
 
Anyway ... Leviathan21 is from Argentina and, as he describes:
 
<leviatan21> I'm the responsible of the FEED feature at phpbb  
<leviatan21> Acydburn take my mod and use it to base his own code for phpbb :)
 
So I'm impressed. Not only are those his credentials, but he jumped right into my issue.  He wasn't sure at first, but he dove into the coding on the posting.php file and wound up writing custom code to do what I needed.
 
Thanks to leviatan21 for being both accessible and kind.
 
HERE'S THE CODE if you want to do it yourself.
 

phpBB3 - auto check "disable smilies" when posting a new topic:

  
<leviatan21> I found the way to hack it 
<leviatan21> After this : $smilies_checked = (isset($post_data['enable_smilies'])) ? !$post_data['enable_smilies'] : (($config['allow_smilies']) ? !$user->optionget('smilies') : 1);
<leviatan21> add this : $smilies_checked = (in_array($mode, array('post', 'reply', 'quote')) && !$preview && (isset($post_data['enable_smilies']))) ? 1 : $smilies_checked;
 
Leviatan's site: http://www.mssti.com/phpbb3/viewforum.php?f=3