Remove Smilies, once and for all

One of the most annoying features ever in WordPress is the "feature" to convert smilies into images of smileys, MSN style. Where lots of stuff like this is dismissed these days as "plugin territory", this annoying feature has been in WP since 0.71...

Anyway, sometimes you'll want to disable this feature from within your theme, or maybe even as a sitewide plugin to disable it all over your WordPress MU installation. It's pretty simple to do:

function yst_remove_smileys($bool) {
  return false;
}
add_filter('option_use_smilies','yst_remove_smileys',99,1);

If you want to do that sitewide, add a plugin header to it and throw it in the mu-plugins dir of your WordPress MU installation.