Smilie replacement variables...
 

There's a limit to it, I think it's 10 characters, I looked through admin/functions.php and admin/smilie.php but found nothing useful (well, I searched for 10 lol)

Any ideas on how to change this figure? Is it written into the db maybe?

as i know it's a db-restriction...
alter the field of the replacement text for it :)

ALTER TABLE `smilie` CHANGE `smilietext` `smilietext` CHAR( 25 ) NOT NULL

Change 25 to whatever number you want the new limit to be...there it is :D