Christopher – thanks for this post. Cute? Maybe… but I thought my site had been hacked. Cute? I don’t think so… because the Smiley doesn’t show up when working on my site from my primary computer (where I installed the plugin from). The smiley only shows up to visitors and I only noticed once I viewed my website while traveling. WTF. This sure makes it seem like an effort to hide the smiley, if so why? And why not tell us about it and allow control? I have to seriously question what this plugins true goals are. Uninstalled for me until I find out.

For some reason trackbacks won’t even display on my blog (presumably there’s a template tag missing from my heavily customised theme). This used to bother me, but actually I’ve come to realise that I find trackbacks get in the way.As you say, they’re generally out of context. Also they tend not to give enough information to glean the context they were written in, you have to leave the current page in order to read them, and often their authors are referring to the original post but not actually commenting on it.If I ever get around to figuring why trackbacks won’t display on my blog, I might try bunching them together at the end of the comments. That way they should make sense as a group, and not interfere with the discussion.