Here's what Bob said. By the way, our Forum is from SMF and the website itself uses Joomla.
"That's a Joomla add-on "module", and I found one that was supposed to link SMF with Joomla, but the trail petered out (I went to the company, but their link to the extension was dead). There's no clue in the existing module as to where it came from, and no switches to turn on those popups.
The popups they're talking about are in SMF, ours (well, the ones we don't have) are in Joomla.... apples and oranges.
I propose bumping up the characters allowed, (and take up more space), and I'll poke around some more."
So -- no, we can't do it without help from others -- that we can't yet find, and maybe we'll try something to show a few more of the characters in the list on the home page. That's all for now. . .and thanks for asking.