What does the text "Message Edited by ...

What does the text "Message Edited by ..." mean at the end of some postings?

It means someone wrote a smart aleck remark, lost their nerve and went back and changed it. But I don't know anyone like that.

Someone edited the message. The nice thing is that if you post and your message looks stupid or you reread it, you can go back and clean it up. But if you say "The artist formerly known as Prince is a pretentious dweeb" and someone comments "how rude!" you can go back and change your message to say "Mother Theresa is a saint." and the person saying "how rude" looks like a jerk. Except for that little tell-tale message "this message has been edited by ..."

OK. I see now what the little icons mean :-) So last Q: How do I produce the smileys? I've seen more than one type... Maybe the info is in some FAQ-like file that I missed, sorry if that's the case... I'll look around.

Yes actually, that knowledge is cleverly hidden behind the link labeled "faq".

(I really like that one BTW.) Note also that editing your messages is useful for correcting HTML errors (not that I would ever commit such a thing) - it's like having a preview.

The smiley I use is just a colon followed by a right paren

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The only problem with this is when you are in th jdbc forum and you want to talk about j d b c : o d b c bridges. The colon "oh" gets converted to a smiley.
When writing a message look for "smilies legend".
I never knew this one existed:

or how about