vBulletin Manual - Smilie Display Order

Unlike many other items in vBulletin, the display order of a smilie actually affects the final HTML output generated by your board.

Consider this example where you have two smilies:

Smilie Name	Smilie Text	Smilie Image
Smilie 1	:o
Smilie 2	:o)

The smilie display order controls the order in which smilies will be parsed. If Smilie 1 were to be parsed first, not only would all instances of :o be converted to

, but also the first two characters of Smilie 2 would be matched and converted, leaving you with

).

To make these smilies parse correctly, Smilie 2 should have a smaller display order than Smilie 1, so that it is parsed first and is not picked up in the search for Smilie 1.