EASILY my most common typo. Just making it something like would do the job, but it's a LOT less likely to be casually typed. Usually in long quotations, which makes it hard to catch unless 1) you're used to looking for it and/or 2) you always hit "Preview" before "Submit. " Which last is actually the kind of thing you might put on a "Help" page, but I'm not off again until Sunday....

But you get the point. Maybe 8I then. Guess that shows how often I'm feeling "shy. " ' />

Yeah, I see this typo a lot. People should preview their posts!

Alternately, could we have noparse tags? They could be used to solve this problem and possibly be used in other areas.

(For those of you who don't know, noparse tags suppress other code tags. eg, <noparse></noparse> would just appear as a colon : and a bracket ) rather than a smiley face.)

Blech. The problem with that is I need to trawl through the archives and update all the posts that use the old smiley to the new smiley code... and that may break other posts.

I'm tempted just to leave it as it is

No one's really going to mind.

Preview does prevent it, if you remember, though it can be easy to miss in a long text if you copy an article or something. It's probably NOT worth breaking the site to "fix" the typo regardless. Given those alternatives, the status quo seems reasonable.