Strange behaviour of emoticons in character count

Continuing the discussion from Notifications not clearing properly unless visited from menu:

I was replying to a question of @sam’s, which really just required a “yes” or “no” answer, but of course, Discourse has a 20 character minimum requirement. Stuck for inspiration, I threw in a smilie and found that apparently counts for at least six characters, as you can see.

1 Like

Edit: Please don’t fix this, as I like replying with:

:strawberry: :cake: :yum:

1 Like

I don’t think this is a bug. :smile: has 7 characters: :smile:

2 Likes

:last_quarter_moon_with_face:

Edit: Thanks - that seems to be the answer. Unexpected, but not a bug.

1 Like

:birthday:

Okay, so this seems to apply to uploaded images too. Shouldn’t these be excluded from the character count?

If I were to paste an image in my response, it would exceed the 20 characters needed to post a reply/topic, so I could post an image and leave it at that… Maybe that was intended…