Smilies count as characters?
 

My forum setting in Message Posting and Editing Options is 5 min characters to post.

However, members just click on a smile and nothing more and it posts. This is annoying because members can just click on a smile and not even enter a character over and over again to build up their post count.

Is there a way to make smilies not count as characters? I can't find a setting for this. - Thanks.

There is no setting for this. You may want to try a search to see if there is a mod.

Interesting... I am working on that section of the code currently to assist another user -- so I will check this out. What version of vb are you running?

What is probably happening is that the raw count is probably including the alt-text field for smilies for example ":sleeping:", thus the count will be 10. This might not be an easy fix depending how the parser is written. Of course an easy fix is just to lengthen the minimum requirement.