It seems like there’s a bug when emojis are pasted right after text.
Edit: it turned out to be a setting — see below.
To reproduce:
- Go here and copy the emoji onto your clipboard.
- Make a comment below and write some text (like “testing”) and paste two emojis directly after the text without any spaces.
It should look like this in the editor and preview window:

Once the post is submitted, the first emoji will be converted to text, like :fire:.
Here’s the output:
text:fire:![]()
Edit: I’ve reproduced it in three Discourse forums, including this one.

