Plower, look in the FAQ under Can I Use HTML in my Posts, and follow those instructions; i.e., for a smile /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif type "smile" in brackets[] instead of the quotation marks I just used, etc.
All those emoticons are hard to remember, so you might want to print the FAQ and keep a hard copy handy. Makes it a little faster when posting a reply to have a hard copy of the instructions nearby.
Cliff, when you click on the REPLY button and the message box appears, look up at the top over your Username and you will see "<font color=blue>markup in your posts</font color=blue>" underlined. Click on that and you will see all the options including <font color=blue>cool</font color=blue> <font color=green>colors</font color=green> <font color=orange>we are</font color=orange> <font color=red>fond of </font color=red><font color=purple>here</font color=purple>.