I've been guilty too of posting too many emoticons in a post.
Remember, the rules state 'no excessive emoticons'.

So I'm thinking, 1 to 3 emoticons in a post, is plenty.

Emoticons are images and images do consume resources.

This is an emoticon:

Time to try out, and use text-based emoticons instead ( like ^U^ or =D )

valerie wrote: This is an emoticon:

Thanks Val, I knew what a emoticon was/is I was just wondering what about other images , I should have worded my question diff..LOL
I should not post when I am tired (giggle)

edit to add more

It's not all that big of a deal except that some posts have a crazy amount of emoticons and I have
been editing those out.

The only thing about using an emoticon from some where else, you just would want to make sure
it was yours. In other words if you link it from someone else's site, that could be bad because they
can change the link to anything else. So as long as you have control over it, that would be ok.

Oups! Didn't knew about this rule... I posted once about 100 on a topic about celebrating Clixsense I hope that doesn't count ...