Autocorrecting emojis (a minor, not-so-serious rant post/site suggestion)

[TheShyestGuy]

When you take <3 and turn it into , or take :) and turn it into ... do you realize what you've just done?

There's a reason people prefer old-fashion emoticons over pictograms sometimes, you know...

A) Some of the designs genuinely just don't convey the same emotion.

Sometimes they interfere with actual text ("B)" doesn't actually become the sunglasses emoji on this forum, but it does on many others, and it can be a big obstruction of text flow).

In order to manually correct things back to normal, you've gotta use a custom unicode character called a zero width space to keep them digitally separate without any visual difference to humans. Many older devices and some mobile phones/smart devices lack fonts supporting a wide range of the unicode consortium, meaning that they can render like an awkward little dotted block with some numbers and/or letters inside, or as a diamond with an inverted question mark inside ("�"), instead. (In the case of the zero width space specifically, it might appear as a block containing the characters "200B" inside, since that's the unicode identifier for the zero width space - somewhat like this: (or: (if you use light theme)).)

Edit: It seems like my placement of zero-width spaces actually did nothing. It appeared to have done something, but upon returning to the page today, the symbols I cancelled out had been formatted as well. (It's also technically possible that Novear did something to disable the zero-width space in fixing the emoji issue.) I fixed the visual integrity of the post by reinstating the unformatted symbols.

Edited March 9 by TheShyestGuy
Added a note and fixed the post.

[Novaer]

This is likely baked in IPS; I will see if it can be undone, or edited but I won't make any promises. 

[Novaer]

=) :) :D <3 =] 

I think that fixes it. We'll see how it goes. Most people who use EcchiDreams use their smartphones and most phones have emoji's built into their keyboards, with apps like GBoard and the like. Desktop users can still use ":" if you type ":" followed by a character it will bring up the quick Emoji box.

Edited March 9 by Novaer

[TheShyestGuy]

Dang, nice. You work fast.