A discussion began regarding the strange behavior of emoticons in Discourse’s character count. TechnoBear discovered that adding a smilie :smile: met the 20 character minimum requirement, which seemed to count for at least 6 characters. However, downey pointed out that :smile: actually has 7 characters.
The conversation continued with users experimenting with different emoticons, such as cpradio using multiple food emoticons and sam using a birthday cake emoticon.
cpradio further noted that this behavior also applies to uploaded images, which could potentially be used to circumvent the character count requirement by posting an image alone. It is unclear whether this is an intended feature or not.
Continuing the discussion from Notifications not clearing properly unless visited from menu:
I was replying to a question of @sam’s, which really just required a “yes” or “no” answer, but of course, Discourse has a 20 character minimum requirement. Stuck for inspiration, I threw in a smilie and found that apparently counts for at least six characters, as you can see.
Edit: Please don’t fix this, as I like replying with:
I don’t think this is a bug. 
has 7 characters: :smile:
Edit: Thanks - that seems to be the answer. Unexpected, but not a bug.
Okay, so this seems to apply to uploaded images too. Shouldn’t these be excluded from the character count?
If I were to paste an image in my response, it would exceed the 20 characters needed to post a reply/topic, so I could post an image and leave it at that… Maybe that was intended…