Welcome to the new Boards.ie platform - Version 1.0 :)

On top of all of that, which is true....it was also said Vanilla would make issuing updates far more efficient than it was under vBulletin, that the site would run more efficiently, that we'd have most (if not all) if the functionality that vBulletin offered, and that when the dust settled, all would be well....

Its been three years. Three actual years have passed since the move, and aside from the usual gripes you get about such changes, it feels less reliable, less usable, less intuitive, and less functional than it ever did under vBulletin.

I'd also agree that raw Vanilla is god awful to use too, so stripping the customisations out and reverting to vanilla Vanilla would bring with it it's own raft of complaints, and we'd still end up with a cack website anyway.

I don't think Vanilla is a great fit. Yes there are other forums that use it fine, and I don't really understand what's so complex about the needs of Boards that can't be provided by Vanilla, but it's had three years to provide them (and hasn't.) We're not talking advanced discussion forum features here at all. It feels like we got some bargain bin Beta Tester account with Vanilla though, and it has felt like life support for Boards for a while now.

That's just the implementation of native Unicode emoji. So it's not even the same as the old custom smilies/emoticons.

If you are on phone, use you phones emojis, if you on windows, use windows key and period, to pull up windows emojis. They native emojis should all work, and they should be faster than the site selection one, which doesn't even have search capability.👍👍👍