XF 2.0 Garbled text as smilies

[abdfahim]

Since I upgraded to XF2 (I also upgraded the database to utf8mb4), I am seeing random cases where smilies become garbled character like below.

Upon checking with the affected members, I found they used Android 6.x and iOS 11.x devices. To make it more confusing, one of the members failed to reproduce this issue using the same device (that resulted this before).

I tried to reproduce myself using Android 4.4.2 and iOS 10.x, but couldn't do so.

Is anyone else facing this issue?

 

[Mike]

When you say smilies, do you mean XF smilies or emoji?

When it comes to emoji, what is shown will depend on the specific device's support for that character (and any modifiers in use), though generally recent versions of iOS should have close to the most up-to-date support.

 

[Chromaniac]

Android 4.4.2... It probably would fail to support most modern emojis.

 

[abdfahim]

When you say smilies, do you mean XF smilies or emoji?

When it comes to emoji, what is shown will depend on the specific device's support for that character (and any modifiers in use), though generally recent versions of iOS should have close to the most up-to-date support.

To be honest, even after Googling and reading few blogs, I still don't get the distinction between them. It seems like smilies are set of images linked to certain textual symbols whereas emojis are Unicode characters works in the same way the non-English languages work.

All I am using is the XF extended smilies since my XF1 age and I haven't changed anything in XF2 (except running the command to convert databases to utf8mb4), so I am not sure exactly which class that belongs to.

Edit: I did include $config['fullUnicode'] = true; in my config file.

 

[Chromaniac]

smilies use images hosted online so they would work on any device without any issues.
emojis are complicated. your operating system/browser/app has to support it. and new emojis keep on getting added on a regular basis. so if your OS does not support the newer emoji, they would appear as boxes on your device. even windows 10 with all the latest updates do not seem to support the newer emojis now available on latest builds of android and ios.
xf1.x does not support any emojis because of database structure. the script updates the database and now it would support any emoji. you can post it from a modern device. but that does not guarantee that everyone else would get to see it.
your case seems different though. boxes indicate that they are emojis and not smilies. if you could link to the post, that might help i guess. smilies would work if they exist with the same smiley code after the upgrade. even if they do not exist in the database, they should appear as :smiley: type format.

 

[abdfahim]

That's a nice explanation, thanks.

I definitely don't see any :smiley: type format from the Chrome inspection, so that should be an emoji as you said.

Now, I am a bit confused about how the user ended up using an emoji as my forum editor (like XF.com) only shows the smilies button. Is it like the supported devices have some special emoji keyboard even though I do not have anything in my forum editor? For example, how would I use an emoji here in this thread? I am using latest Chrome in my Windows 7 PC.

 

[Chromaniac]

well. smartphone users have keyboard that have emoji panels.
you can copy paste emoji from a browser extension or a website on a desktop browser. i use this personally.
windows' internal keyboard in recent versions also has emoji panel which can be used to insert emojis.
apple i imagine has similar feature. i believe they showcased emoji panel as a feature for their touchpanel on new macbooks?

 

[abdfahim]

Ah, got it. Thanks a ton. It clarifies my concept of emoji.

I think I now realize what is happening. I tested 5 emojis using this extension and 2 of them appearing garbled. The affected users said they used a "happy" smiley (they must have unknowingly meant emoji), must be one that is unsupported similar to the last emoji below (this is pretty fundamental though, how come this is not supported!).

 

[Chromaniac]

emojis are complicated. basic ones are old. but in recent times they have gained color and gender. so even the basic ones in new variants are incompatible with old devices.
emojis are evolving at such a rapid pace that google had to develop their own solution to deliver newer emojis on older android versions.

 

[abdfahim]

Thanks. One more thing, can you please tell me if my understanding is correct:

For an emoji to work, both the poster and the viewer's browser need to support that emoji?
If the poster's OS/browser does not support a particular emoji, that will come as a garbled box to all the viewers (even if the viewer's browser has the support).
On the other hand, if the viewer's browser does not have emoji support, only he'll be affected but others will see it properly (provided that poster's browser has the support).

 

[Chromaniac]

for emojis to work... only the software/app needs to support emoji. xf2 added support for it. xf1 does not support it. any emoji posted on xf1 just disappeared from the post content when it was posted.

anyone can post emoji to xf2 (using copy paste method for example even if your device does not support viewing it!). it would just appear as a square box if your device does not support it (for either party... poster/viewer).

 

[abdfahim]

Hmm, thanks