Shoutbox

Yeah, I've noticed a few people from my school who have started doing that, luckily not on a large scale though, but yeah, it's really annoying.

You can disable custom emoticons by doing the following;
- Main MSN Messenger Window
- Tools > Options
- Messages
- Untick the box next to "Show custom emoticons"
- Click OK or Apply

Of course when you do that you run the risk of not being able to understand the text displayed now, instead of the images if they have been given dumb names.

You could always take the easy option of asking them to not do it, because you find it hard to read.

Or slowly try and teach them about what n00bs are, and how many people get confused with stunts like this.