Just type lol, not LOL....

July 14, 2007 10:10 AM

I use Pidgin. A friend uses MSN Messenger. How do I turn off the annoying custom emoticons?

Every time he types "LOL", I get this annoying little stick man who dances. When he types "time", I get this bizarre little clock picture. They aren't part of my emoticon set, and they appear to be being sent by MSN to Pidgin, because it takes a couple of seconds to load sometimes.

How do I stop this from happening? It really disrupts the flow of the conversation, and makes it hard to follow when I have to guess what the word behind the picture is. I've tried turning off emoticons completely, which works but also stops the normal smilies (which I don't want to happen), and I'm loathe to ask him to turn them off, because he seems to like them so much.

posted by Rabulah to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Tools -> Preferences -> Smiley Themes. Set this to "none". It will disable all graphical smileys, and should take care of your problem.
posted by namewithoutwords at 10:48 AM on July 14, 2007

Yeah, that works fine, but it disables ALL emoticons, something that I don't want to happen. I only want custom emoticons disabled.
posted by Rabulah at 4:27 PM on July 14, 2007

It's - amazingly enough - an account-specific setting. If you look into your account settings, it will be there. I can't help further as I don't use Pidgin, but this is how libpurple organises it.
posted by PuGZ at 1:33 AM on July 15, 2007

This is from Gaim on my Linux box but, to elaborate on PuGZ's hint, go to Accounts -> Add/Edit. Or try Ctrl A. Then select your MSN account and click Modify. A new window pops up. Click the Advanced tab and de-select the box that says "Show custom smileys".

I've not updated since the name change to Pidgin but it's definitely possible. I also don't have a Windows machine to see if there's a difference, assuming you are running Windows.
posted by 6550 at 10:45 AM on July 15, 2007

Thanks guys. That seems to have solved it. :)
posted by Rabulah at 3:11 PM on July 15, 2007