I hear from a little bird that there is a site-wide preference that can be set to force automatic conversion of emoji (e.g., :-)) to emoticons (e.g. ). This site appears to have that preference off, which is great for me (I don’t want to convert :-/) but presumably just ok for those want forced conversion so that they don’t have to deal with the pop-up menu for conversion.
I think this would be much better as an individual preference. In fact, this was previously discussed in Emoji user preferences - #5 by sam back in 2014, but the subject was closed last year without any apparent resolution.
If the menu isn’t that big a deal for emoticon users, it might even make more sense just to remove the option, so at least administrators can’t frustrate users who don’t want their emoticons force-converted. (I have some evidence that some admins do this unintentionally.) I don’t see any good reason to force conversion on those that don’t want it, though I’m open to arguments that this is a good or important ability to have.
I definitely agree here, there are some site settings that baffle me as to why admin get to choose for everybody instead of users being able to pick (I don’t have an exact list but every now and then I find something like this that confuses me). Maybe there should be a new “posting preferences” tab where stuff like this can go instead of having admins decide for you.
How do you envision this working technically? So, you write a post, then submit it, and instead of the post being baked based on the site settings as before, your individual preferences are now checked. I can still understand that.
But if I quote your post in my post, then your preferences would have to be applied to the quote, and my preferences to my part of it. That’s where it gets tricky, in my view.
The same goes for when we both edit the same wiki post one after the other.
I also see a problem if posts need to be re-baked later on. For one thing, it’s more likely that users will change their preferences than that admins will change settings without being aware of the consequences, so old posts might have been written with different preferences. Plus, the author and their preferences would have to be checked for every single post.
Keep in mind this is an editor preference. So it seems reasonable that it applies only to the :-) you actually type, and if there’s another one there already in the text, it doesn’t do the auto-conversion or popup menu. And I think that’s already the case: I’ve never seen the pop-up come up when quoting people, though I’m not sure I’ve ever quoted an emoji. But try quoting this and see what happens for you.
(Ugh, either someone switch the setting or, more likely, I was wrong and this particular instance of Discourse is indeed forcing emoticon to emoji conversion: I appear to have ‘tricked’ the editor into not converting, but it converted when I posted.)
So when I use the “quote whole post” option in the composer I get
[quote="Moin, post:5, topic:407255, full:true"]
What I mean is that when I post :) it is converted into :slight_smile: . But my post still contains `:)`
[/quote]
So for a correctly rendered quote, you’d need the preference of the author of the quote, not the one of the person posting. As long as it’s the same for everyone, you can treat all content of the post in the same way.
). This site appears to have that preference off, which is great for me (I don’t want to convert :-/) but presumably just ok for those want forced conversion so that they don’t have to deal with the pop-up menu for conversion.