XF 1.5 Emoji issue

[Wildcat Media]

This one is perplexing me. We just had a new member join and attempt to use this in her first message:



This is XF 1.5, and UTF8-MB4 support is not yet available in the database.

How is this happening? I remember somewhere in the extended character sets seeing such basic things a the suits of a deck of cards, smiley faces, etc., and the heart is U+2665, diamond is U+2666, white smiling face is U+263A, black smiling face is U+263B, etc. They are just past the range of the "border" characters we used to use in the old days of ASCII.



Is that how they're getting around it? I have a feeling, then, that the browser is interpreting that heart and applying a graphical emoji to it.

 

[Wildcat Media]

I did a test in a post, and show that the characters rendered just as shown (trying to demonstrate to staff how it happened):



I'm going to do one more test to see if these appear in a subject line and a signature, as this user has a heart in their signature also (we don't allow images in signatures, so it's not an image).