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.
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