To use an emoticon in a chat, type ( followed by the name of the emoticon, sometimes known as the shortcut text.  For example:(awesome) or (hugefan). Hipchat suggests emoticons to you after you type (.

If you're used to typing :) at the end of each sentence you're in luck, Hipchat recognizes most smileys too. 

Which emoticon to use? 

To see a list of all the global emoticons log in to Hipchat in your browser and go to Emoticons.) Your teammates may have also added some custom emoticons - who knows what you'll discover! 

Sneaky hint: To avoid embarrassing emoticon fails, start a 1-to-1 chat with yourself and practice in there.

But what if you're not sure what someone is saying with their emoticon?  Hover over it to find out what it's called, or look it up in the list, then you'll be able to use it too. 

If you don't want to see them, you can turn off emoticons in the web and desktop apps. Go to your profile photo > Settings > General, then deselect Replace text emoticons with images. 

Create your own emoticons

Give your company brand (or your team's inside jokes) some love by adding some of your own emoticons to Hipchat. 

You can upload png, gif (animated gifs happily supported) and jpg images up to 2MB of any resolution, with a minimum of 30px on each side. We'll resize them down to the appropriate scale. 

If you have a whole bunch of images you want to turn into emoticons, put them in a .zip file and upload them all at once. (Your .zip file can contain as many as 50 emoticons.)

Got your images ready? Log in to Hipchat in your browser and go to Emoticons.

Admins can delete emoticons you've added. They can't turn off the default emoticons, but they can override them by creating a new emoticon with the same name (shortcut text).

Also, they can limit emoticon uploads to admins only (sadpanda).