For static smilies they could be uploaded like comment pictures, but for animated ones indeed there is no solution. I should maybe add some smiley some time

That's okay

The current active site that has smacking to the forehead:

Maybe we need our own smacking to the forehead

I should maybe have kept the original smiley name for easier replacement. If you search on the text I mentioned earlier in your old comments, you can still find all the smilies to replace

This is to do on my list to change that smiley that took the whole page to another link that works (the d'oh smack at the head) smiley I posted some time ago.

I made a small change to handle older comments the same way as the recent ones. Years ago HTML was allowed in comments, which can be quite messy, so I converted the HTML of old comments to BBcode so now all are managed the same way.

I also had to mass-replace some dead smilies in comments: at a moment people were using smilies from a site that changed their structure, so instead of a small 16x16 smiley these comments had a huge generic crying smiley occupying the whole screen. I replaced these by a block like this:
[dead external link to a smiley]
(not very pretty, but it is explicit)

Well indeed if you applied a +25% zoom on the site, the admin pages look enormous
But it is actually the "public" pages that are rather small and should maybe originally be written bigger for most of the people
The thing is that it is not only smartphone vs desktop, but also that on both the user can change the global font size, independently from the image resolution.
I've on my to-do list the idea to allow to define a different size for the "public" pages like you can do with the admin pages, and try to have something more coherent. But it is not easy with that old HTML code that I cannot change too much (otherwise people will say it was better before).

I've been mostly away from IMCDb for a month now (I've started a part-time job) and am quite surprised by the sheer size of the admin page ! I'm not a tech guy so I don't know why a "small" smartphone screen needs a page that looks enormous on a 15-inch 1920x1080 laptop display... which I don't like anyway, as text and icons were too small for my eyesight when I first got it, so I've had to add a +25% zoom to make things legible. And I guess that zoom doesn't help about the page size.

Anyway, the zoom adjustment and Reduce space between rows option have helped.

Header on site page says

"Small update for admin pages: now you can asjust the size of the text via an option on your profile page. See on this thread on the forum for more details or to report any problem that you notice."

I've never been able to asjust anything. I can't whistle either, pop my cheeks, or click my fingers ...

Possible that it does not focuses links indeed.
I thought you also had an issue with the button, but it was maybe someone else in addition to Lateef then