Fix emoji parsing (two possible ways)

hatrickpatrick

Obviously as everyone knows, forums like vbulletin essentially invented emojis years before they became ubiquitous. :cool::P:confused::pac::D;) However, in recent years, emojis have moved from the text-to-image format used by forum code, to unicode characters which themselves display natively on whatever device one is using.

For whatever reason, vBulletin as currently implemented on Boards doesn't parse them properly. For instance, when I try to do the common "tears of laughter" emoji, it comes up as 😂 , and when one tries the "bear facepalm" emoji, it comes up as 🙈 .

I presume this is caused by Boards' code using an outdated implementation of unicode, from a time before emojis were included as part of the actual font. Whether it would be easy to change that without having to redesign all the code, I honestly don't know. If it would be, then I suggest simply updating the code to accomodate these new fangled unicode characters.

If not, the next best option would be to add PHP code to the posting engine, which would scan each message for any emoji characters, and then replace them in the code with the traditional vBulletin smileys - so for instance, the laughing emoji 😂 could be changed to in much the same way as :D currently is. Obviously there are only a handful of vBulletin smileys, but it can be argued that there are only a handful of emojis in extremely regular use by most people, and that those correspond fairly well to the standard vBulletin smiley set as currently implemented by Boards.

It's just very easy to absent mindedly hit emojis when typing on Boards, forgetting momentarily that this site doesn't parse them correctly seeing as most other sites do. Not a huge issue obviously, but seems like something which would probably be fairly simple to fix one way or the other.

Boards.ie: Mark

Hi hatrickpatrick,

Thanks for the suggestion. Smilies will likely take a back seat for a while as other development work is done, but I appreciate you taking the time to not only give feedback, but offer a couple of different solutions. I've added it to the development list for the time being.

As an aside, I kinda like the black and white bear facepalm

Boards.ie: Niamh

I thought "bear facepalm" was the monkey see no evil (hear no evil, speak no evil)...anyway, I digress, the emojis turned out in my view, is that how you expected them to look? If so, maybe we can figure out why it appears in some browsers but not others, not all emojis work for me either using Chrome.