Custom emoji overrides

feature
1

Prior related thread: Custom emoji set(s)

I’d like a way to override certain builtin emoji with my own. Specifically, I’d like to use Mutant Standard instead of the default emoji set.

This particular emoji set deviates from unicode emoji in some specific ways:

How What I want from Discourse
It makes professions gender-neutral :white_large_square: Let me choose that interpretation for my community by uploading both man_ and woman_.
It adds more skin tones :white_large_square: Let me add modifier suffixes (like t5: in :man_cook:t5:)
It invents new emoji :white_check_mark: These are obviously custom emoji
It is not yet complete :white_large_square: I assume non-overridden emoji would default to the default set.

Outside my specific case, I think custom emoji sets would be useful in general. It makes sense to me to support without a plugin the way custom invidual emoji are supported now.

2 Likes
2

I like the idea of adding https://mutant.tech/ as a selectable emoji set, sadly a bunch of stuff is missing and can not be backfilled.

I wonder what @joffreyjaffeux thinks about this.

Diverting from Emoji unicode though would be a huge nightmare which I would not like to embark on.

3

The missing emojis are not at issue, we can just fallback to another set. We would need to provide rake task to pull emojis from different sources.

I do agree we should stay in the limits of the official emoji list.

2 Likes
4

Also they have some very specific attribution rules that must be followed.

5

We should not allow this or you can’t change emoji set after. Once all your posts have unsupported emoji skin tones level, we would have to fallback everything to the same skin tone level, I don’t think the added value is worth the “lock up”.

6

I don’t think we should allow this if they don’t exist in the official emoji list, moreover unicode is (slowly) moving towards this, so the added value will be quite low in the future.

7

If all of this is clear, I can try to investigate next year what would be needed to support a custom emoji set.

@sam “Also they have some very specific attribution rules that must be followed.” I’m not sure what you mean by this.

8

This does present a problem, but the solution is easy: custom emoji like :astronaut_b2: instead of :astronaut:b2:. It’d be nice to be able to mark variations better in the autocomplete, but it works for now!

It’s CC BY-NC-SA.