Why are smileys counted as "images" in posts?

[Jonathan Busby]

I recently ran into a problem with smileys / emoticons / emojis ( or whatever you want to call them ) when I was replying to a post in the forums. Specifically, if I have more than 10 of eg. these " " then I get an error message like the following when trying to post a message or reply :

Quote:Please correct the following errors before continuing:
The message you entered contained more than 18 images, while only 10 images per message are allowed. Please lower the image count in your message to meet the limit.

Is the forum software buggy or is it supposed to behave this way?

Thanks,

Jonathan