I have been using Discourse for 4 years and love the modern design and quick update. Thank you!
Recently I have noticed some issues in my forum, that in China, we seldom use spaces like you do in English, so basically every emoji from emoji picker is screwed like this:
呵呵:thinking:
Which is annoying and confuses most Chinese users. Can you think of a way to improve the Chinese user experience?
(a) If an emoji are chosen from the emoji picker, it will lack for a space before the first colon :, not only in Chinese posts, but in English posts as well. Users will get a not rendered a:smile: (a:smile:) if they input a and then select (:smile:) from the emoji picker.
(b) A colon : after a Latin character won’t cause auto-completion, yet a colon after a CJK Unihan character will. It could be solved exactly by (2).
To solve (a), (3) should be implemented in the emoji picker, not / not just in auto-completion.
I remember going down the regular expression route in the past but that means we carry this giant regexp everywhere we go. For chinese forums, we can just have a site setting that does not require a space before : to render emojis.