I agree with that. We are here for older games. Oldschool almost. So lets stick with real smilies and keeps those big-too-happy-grin-icons at Messenger. :D

I have no real trouble with graphical emoticons, but one thing I *do* hate is when a forum has *tons* of graphical emoticons that are *all* accessed by a text abbreviation, making it very easy to accidentally put in an emoticon. I can't count the number of times I've seen people try to make a list like
A) first item
B) second item
Only to have the B) replaced by a sunglasses-emoticon... That's just no good to anyone. Keep the list reasonable or better yet, making inserting graphical emoticons explicit if you must have them.
I have a clearer dislike for forums that allow enormous signature blocks with (animated) images, since it wastes everyone's time just to allow people an ego boost (or something, I have no idea why they still think their signatures are cute the seventeenth time you see them). It invariably becomes a sport to see who can make the biggest, most attention-grabbing signature possible.
Any forum where I have to hit ESC on every page to stop all the animations from distracting me is doing something wrong...

Been there. I am regular reader of uk-polos forum and it is pretty good forum, I have to say... However I am still using some picture blacklist plugin to mozilla, so I can blacklist their 300x640px enormous sized sigs... "Yes. You have a Polo. Me too. Now, get it off so I can read the forum." Sometimes thread with 8 short messages grows to several screen size, just because of those sigs. :D

I think this is more a "forum culture" issue rather than one with emoticons per se. Nothing's forcing people to sound like overexcited morons.
I mean, it's not like you can't do the same in a text-based forum, even if it doesn't have the same impact!!!oneoneeleven :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D and now I put on my hat because I'm so quirky >:-) >:-) >:-) >:-) >:-) >:-) >:-) and now I'm taken out and shot *-x
That said, it does seem to be the case that any forum with *animated* emoticons will eventually grow a culture of people who will post entire pages full of dancing smileys as a way of saying "me, too".

I can't stand emoticons myself. It is rather distracting having an annoying bright yellow ball right in the middle of a sentence.

Keep it text.
(And no sigs while we are at it, unless you can keep them to a single line, reduced font size.)
Do we really want silly grinning (animated!) faces? I mean *really*?

Another vote for no emoticons, and also for never ever letting people have a signature with an image in it. Both those things are quite obnoxious.