Weeelllll!
Not quite young and very kind sir!
First. I nearly always have broken emoticons. Even the ones in the emoticon menu bar above the message box are mainly boxes with the text word in it.
Currently, on my iPad, it reads:
'Smiley' 'Wink' 'Cheesy'
'Cool'
'Roll Eyes'
'Lips Sealed'
'Kiss'
So, if I were to hit the 'Smiley' button in the line above it would simoly insert the text representation of the smiley, like this
and when I preview and post the message it still shows as a colon and an end square bracket. Any of the un-broken emoticons in the menu bar still work perfectly and show correctly when I preview and post.
This gradually gets worse, but never better, until I do 'something' I can't remember what...
The reason that I use the Apple iPad emoticons is that the ones on this rubbish site don't work half the time, for me. You'd think someone would do something about it ‘Wink'.
Second.
For four days now I have been getting the 'message body left empty' message even when replying to non-emoticon messages and even when creating my own message from scratch. I can't review the post but can 'post' it and then edit it OK.
This has happened on and off since we set the site up. I think I need to close my tabs (which are otherwise permanently open) to reset the thing.
I actually thought it was an Apple/iPad thing but was about to burst into print but you beat me to it.
Other 'features' of the iPad that grind my gears are the neat thing where if I type two consecutive words beginning with 't' or 'th' the thing selects and deletes the last section of text I have just typed. 'Cool' eh! Not.
This should be a broken 'smiley'
and this one should be a working 'grin'
and this one a 'cool' from my iPad keyboard 😎 which promptly brought up the error message about the body being empty.
Over to someone who knows what they are talking about...