So every time someone pings me, the ping thing doesn't seem to recognise the '( :' smile on the end of my name so a completely different user ends up getting pinged. Does anyone know what I can do about this?

You could make a forum group that people could use to ping you :)

If you do as Vinaya suggests, I would recommend putting something in your signature for people to ping you through the group so they know about it. :)

did you get this ping? if so just replace the ( and : with __

Yeah I got the ping! So do I just leave the '(:' off and replace it with an underscore?

you'd be pinged as ana__ replacing the ( with _ and the : with one _

Oh my god thank you so much!

Yeah, it does that with hyphens, colons, semicolons, parenthesis, and just about every other symbol that's not already an underscore, letter, or number.