Problematic Smilies

by Zeta May 15th 2019, 9:47 am

I've noticed a very irritating issue on my forums and forums where I'm a member. There seems to be some sort of issue with the smilies, one that as far as I can tell seems to appear across all of the forums I frequent, where either the custom smilies or characters that would be smilies, such as the alt code heart, at the forum are being replaced by what I assume are the "standard" ones, even in posts where "disable smilies in this post" is checked. I see the issue both in Chrome and Explorer and at different forums with different CSS and versions.
I have no idea what causes it.
I'm not sure if you knew about it or know why it happens.
How do I stop it from happening?

by **skouliki** May 15th 2019, 9:52 am

hello

i check in my forums cant see any broken or replaced smiley
is it possible to post a screenshot of the issue you see please

by Zeta May 15th 2019, 11:51 am

skouliki wrote:hello

i check in my forums cant see any broken or replaced smiley
is it possible to post a screenshot of the issue you see please

I had a couple test posts made to display the issue.

Problematic Smilies Smilie-test-1

This first one is at a forum where smilies are disabled completely. The alt code characters for the card suit were put in and got changed to broken smilie code instead of appearing as the alt code characters.

(alt+3)

(alt+4)

(alt+5) and

(alt+6)

This second one is a forum that has custom smilies. The custom heart that is supposed to appear is red and more rounded while the one that ends up showing up in the post is that pink one, which I assume is some sort of default.

EDIT: as another test i put in the alt code characters in this post and unchecked "disable smilies in this post". As you can see they got changed to smilies and upon editing this post to include this update I found that the characters themselves where replaced by the smilie codes seen in the first image.

by **skouliki** May 15th 2019, 12:26 pm

i suppose these settings are enabled, right? profile preferences and admin panel

by Zeta May 15th 2019, 2:01 pm

skouliki wrote:i suppose these settings are enabled, right? profile preferences and admin panel

No. At the forum where the first test was done the forum itself has smilies disabled entirely. Under Messages and Emails > Configuration both "Allow HTML" and "Allow Smilies" is set to "No."
At the second "Allow Smilies" is set to "Yes" but "Allow HTML" is still set to "No."
Here in my Preferences I have "Always Allow HTML" and "Always Enable Smilies" set to "No" and only unchecked the box to allow smilies in the previous post to show that the replacement would occur instead of the alt code character remaining as they were and being displayed properly.

by **skouliki** May 15th 2019, 2:16 pm

we currently had a technical issue which is now solved
can you retry please to see if your issue was related to that problem

edit : are you referring to smilies or emojis?

by **SLGray** May 15th 2019, 10:19 pm

If you mean emojis, it could related to this: https://help.forumotion.com/t157471-emoji-support#1091126

by Zeta May 16th 2019, 3:10 am

skouliki wrote:we currently had a technical issue which is now solved
can you retry please to see if your issue was related to that problem

edit : are you referring to smilies or emojis?

No, the issue is still there.

Is there a difference?

SLGray wrote:If you mean emojis, it could related to this: https://help.forumotion.com/t157471-emoji-support#1091126

My browser won't load that page. Could you just explain?

by **skouliki** May 16th 2019, 9:01 am

The Godfather wrote:Hello,

What you describe is a normal behavior that follows a patch sent online yesterday.

Indeed, we found that some emojis caused a problem in messages that removed all the content after the emoji.

So we published a patch for this problem. It only covers the most popular smileys and emojis for the moment.

This patch provides the following elements :

The addition of the most popular smileys and emojis no longer alters the message content containing them regardless of the forum encoding (utf8 or non-utf8)
If the interpretation of the popular smiley or emoji is impossible, its code (in the form of :smiley_name:) or "?" is displayed.

The behavior you describe fits into case number two but you should know that we will gradually enrich the list of supported smileys and emojis in order to make the problem disappear.

Thank you for your understanding

The Godfather wrote:Balladeer we just analyzed your forum and the problem came from the fact that your forum was in NON UTF-8 encoding which caused a problem in emojis interpreting.

By encoding your forum pages in UTF-8 the problem disappeared and the emojis are now displayed

by Zeta May 16th 2019, 10:43 am

skouliki wrote:
The Godfather wrote:Hello,

What you describe is a normal behavior that follows a patch sent online yesterday.

Indeed, we found that some emojis caused a problem in messages that removed all the content after the emoji.

So we published a patch for this problem. It only covers the most popular smileys and emojis for the moment.

This patch provides the following elements :

The addition of the most popular smileys and emojis no longer alters the message content containing them regardless of the forum encoding (utf8 or non-utf8)
If the interpretation of the popular smiley or emoji is impossible, its code (in the form of :smiley_name:) or "?" is displayed.

The behavior you describe fits into case number two but you should know that we will gradually enrich the list of supported smileys and emojis in order to make the problem disappear.

Thank you for your understanding

The Godfather wrote:Balladeer we just analyzed your forum and the problem came from the fact that your forum was in NON UTF-8 encoding which caused a problem in emojis interpreting.

By encoding your forum pages in UTF-8 the problem disappeared and the emojis are now displayed :mrgreen:

That doesn't really seem to cover the issue? Nothing is removed after the smilie. the entire post is there but its the smilie or its alt code symbol that's being replaced. Nothing about any of that tell me how to stop the replacement. I just want things to appear the way that they are typed.

by **skouliki** May 16th 2019, 12:06 pm

as you can see in my post above the member's forum was analyzed by the Godfather (general admin of forumotion) and the technicians of forumotion in order to find the problem and give the solution

as you can understand if you dont give us your forum url the issue cannot pass to our tech team
as for the other forums you are a member please advice the admins to come here and open a thread about this issue

i respect your decision not to give us your forum url , iam sorry but i can not give you more help regarding your problem

by Zeta May 16th 2019, 12:49 pm

skouliki wrote:as you can see in my post above the member's forum was analyzed by the Godfather (general admin of forumotion) and the technicians of forumotion in order to find the problem and give the solution

as you can understand if you dont give us your forum url the issue cannot pass to our tech team
as for the other forums you are a member please advice the admins to come here and open a thread about this issue

i respect your decision not to give us your forum url , iam sorry but i can not give you more help regarding your problem

As far as I can tell it looks like a global problem. It's even here. So I can't see any reason to give you any links. And as it seems to be a global issue I'd appreciate if somebody looked into and fixed it.
If that's not going to happen then I need somebody to provide a solution. If you aren't going to then I'll wait for somebody that will.

For anybody that's willing to help: I need something to force text to appear as its typed. So, for example, if somebody uses "alt+3" to include a heart it will show up as the alt code character and not be replaced by a smilie/emoji/whatever-you-want-to-call-them or :hearts:.
Thank you in advance to anybody that tries to solve the problem.

by **brandon_g** May 16th 2019, 10:28 pm

This was done serverside to solve an issue with certain emotes causing entire typed messages to go blank. This mainly effects mobile phone emojis. Any custom emotes saved to your forum acp should work fine.

There is no way around this I believe, nor is there any plans to undo this change (as losing an entire message is even more annoying then a replaced emote I would imagine).

-Brandon

by ZuniThoang May 17th 2019, 5:49 am

The sharing is very helpful, thank you very much!

by Zeta May 17th 2019, 6:29 am

brandon_g wrote:This was done serverside to solve an issue with certain emotes causing entire typed messages to go blank. This mainly effects mobile phone emojis. Any custom emotes saved to your forum acp should work fine.

There is no way around this I believe, nor is there any plans to undo this change (as losing an entire message is even more annoying then a replaced emote I would imagine).

-Brandon

I'm not asking that the change be undone. I'm asking that the problems with the change be repaired or that you make the replacement optional.

by **SLGray** May 17th 2019, 7:21 am

It is not an error. The patch stops issues caused by the emolis and smilies (not popular). There is no issue with the popular used ones.

by **SLGray** May 17th 2019, 7:27 am

And one more thing. Alt and number codes are not smilies or emojis. They are symbols and special characters.

by Zeta May 17th 2019, 8:13 am

SLGray wrote:It is not an error. The patch stops issues caused by the emolis and smilies (not popular). There is no issue with the popular used ones.

There's an error somewhere. It may have stopped one issue but clearly there's a new related issue that needs dealt with.

SLGray wrote:And one more thing. Alt and number codes are not smilies or emojis. They are symbols and special characters.

They're supposed to be, and I want them to stay that way. That's the whole problem. things like ☻ (alt+2) and ♪ (alt+13) show up correctly as symbols/special characters but others like :hearts: (alt+3) and of all things :arrow_up_down: (alt+18) and :bangbang: (alt+19) are being replaced with smilies/emojis. The symbols/special character themselves are being replaced. when you edit the post you see the code for the smilie/emoji there where the symbol/special character used to be so even if you have smilies disabled it shows the broken smilies/emoji code instead of the symbol/special character.

by **skouliki** May 17th 2019, 8:22 am

ZuniThoang wrote:The sharing is very helpful, thank you very much!

Please only post in support topics if you can offer a solution or give advice.

by **Ape** May 17th 2019, 5:01 pm

Sadly we can not help on this matter as you will not give our tech team your URL this topic will never be fixed without it sorry.

by **SLGray** May 17th 2019, 7:47 pm

Do you have an option "Encode your entire forum in UTF-8" in your AP? If yes, is it activated?

by Zeta May 18th 2019, 5:14 am

SLGray wrote:Do you have an option "Encode your entire forum in UTF-8" in your AP? If yes, is it activated?

where exactly would I find it in the ap?

by **SLGray** May 18th 2019, 9:18 pm

AP > General > Forum
It should appear here.

by Zeta May 19th 2019, 12:27 am

SLGray wrote:AP > General > Forum
It should appear here.

I can't find that option, so I think its safe to assume I don't have it. There others haven't gotten back to me about it yet.

by Zeta May 21st 2019, 8:34 am

by **SLGray** May 21st 2019, 8:43 am

You just need to add them to your forum.

AP > Display > Avatars > Smilies

by Zeta May 21st 2019, 10:26 am

SLGray wrote:You just need to add them to your forum.

AP > Display > Avatars > Smilies

they need to be prevented, not added. Adding them to the smilie list doesn't prevent to replacement.

by **skouliki** May 21st 2019, 11:35 am

at the moment there are 2 solutions
1) give us your url to pass it to the tech team
2) wait for the techs to release the next patch (it wont be soon, there are more important things to be done first i think)

by Zeta May 21st 2019, 1:01 pm

skouliki wrote:at the moment there are 2 solutions
1) give us your url to pass it to the tech team
2) wait for the techs to release the next patch (it wont be soon, there are more important things to be done first i think)

if you need a url to find and fix this global problem you could just use this support forum, since the problem exists here too.

by **skouliki** May 21st 2019, 1:16 pm

SLGray wrote:It is not an error. The patch stops issues caused by the emolis and smilies (not popular). There is no issue with the popular used ones.

lets all wait for the next patch then
have a nice day !

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