Updating/replacing topic reactions with new icon designs

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around updating and replacing topic reactions with new branded icons on a forum. noahl asks about the implications of removing or replacing reaction icons, particularly regarding existing content and custom emoji usage. awesomerobot explains that removing a reaction option won’t affect existing uses unless the emoji is deleted, and that custom emojis can override default ones if named identically. However, default icons like the heart are SVG-based and require theme-level changes to modify, referencing a guide on replacing default icons. noahl raises an issue with the +1 emoji being renamed to :_1:, which awesomerobot attributes to name sanitization. This will be addressed with a fix in a GitHub pull request, allowing symbols like + and - to be used in custom emoji names.

1

We’re in the process of designing our own (branded) set of reactions for our forum posts/topics (the bottom 7 in the screenshot)

Screenshot 2024-11-25 at 17.40.12
Screenshot 2024-11-25 at 17.40.12614×263 42.4 KB

2 main questions:

  • What happens if we remove a reaction option? Do exisiting topics that have this reaction lose it, or retain it?
    • The reactions we’re looking to remove have been used <15 times in the past 12 months compared to our most used with 3K+
  • Is it possible to replace a reaction’s icon?
    • e.g. the heart is our most used reaction, and we want to continue using it, but update it’s design
2

they’ll retain it as long as you don’t delete the emoji itself (if it’s custom, the default emoji can’t be deleted)

if you upload a custom emoji using the same name as a default emoji, the custom emoji will be used

the heart is a little trickier, because in this form under the post controls it’s not an emoji, but an icon

image

so if you wanted to replace that as well, you’d have to use this process: Replace Discourse's default SVG icons with custom icons in a theme

for completeness you’d have to replace various default icons: heart, d-liked, d-unliked, notification.liked, notification.liked_2, notification.liked_many, notification.liked_consolidated

we have a theme component that changes likes to thumbs up that can be referenced for this: Change the Like Icon to 👍

3

Amazing!

I did not know this - the more you know :exploding_head:

4

@awesomerobot - this was going so well, until the +1 emoji. Which when uploaded is changed to :_1:.

Any ideas? Is this a potential bug?

5

hmm good question… this will also impact situations like -1and :?:

this happens because we sanitize the names of custom emoji by replacing anything that’s not 0-9 or a-z with underscores, I’ll have to check with the team to see about adjusting this

6

We’re going to relax the sanitizing on custom emoji names, so once this is merged + and - will work!

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/30053