Hi Judy

You ight want to try going into your user control panel (the thing that says UserCP near the top left of the page).

Once you are there, click on "Edit Options" on the left hand side.

Once you are in the options, scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see something that says "Message Editor Interface" there is a pull down menu there, and if you choose the one that says "Enhanced Interface - Full WYSIWYG Editing" and then click the "save changes" button at the very bottom.

Once you do that, you should be able to see the actual smile in your text box, instead of seeing the "smile command" with the : and the word smile.

Also, when you use the WYSIWYG option, you can see your text color, see your bold text and everything else (instead of seeing the written commands for these things) right there in the text box as you are typing...

So when you select bold or color or underlining or italics or a larger font or a different font it will show in the text box as soon as you choose it, so you can see exactly what it looks like before you hit the submit post button.

WYSIWYG stands for what you see is what you get

hope that helps
Liz