Patti, the additional smileys are unavailable at this time as reported earlier. If you quote any of the posts you're referring to-- recent posts that have smileys you don't see in the smiley listing-- you'll see that the smileys were posted as image links.
Come to think of it, I've never seen any indication as to whether a post is new or if a thread has a new post in it ... I think that's what you're describing. I haven't seen that on this forum since it was the Vantage Net site. I'd actually forgotten about that feature, which was kind of nice to have. Am I supposed to be seeing this?
Oh yes.
For members, when a board has a new post, the diamond on the home page turns blue. The same goes for the child boards. And when a topic has a new post, a blue "new" tag" appears next to the title in the board listing. Clicking on that new tag will take you directly to the first unread message in the topic. The blue "new" tags in the new post itself, however, went out with YaBB SE.
I've noticed that how you access a post will affect whether or not these indicators disappear. If you're accessing the topics through a direct link, or the posts through "show unread posts" or "view the 10 most recent posts", the blue new post indicators are less reliable. I usually access posts through the board listings, and I've only seen a new tag reappear once, and it seems to be identical to the time Patti saw it and I can only assume it was due to a glitch. But if you're seeing this happen that frequently, Josette, I suspect it's because of the route you're taking to access the posts and recommend that you use the "mark topics as read" feature when your session is finished.
Also, if a post is moved, split, or merged by a moderator after you've already read it, the blue indicators will come back on because the system is reading these as brand new posts. These actions are probably happening a lot more than visitors realize.