No Smilies?

[Cobalt Greywalker]

In my latest post to the Fenspace Forum, I tried to add a smilie and found there aren't any set up for the board.

There are no smilies set for this community

Is this supposed to be this way?

[Bob Schroeck]

I have a vague memory of deciding that smiliest/emoji were unnecessary when setting up the board lo these many years ago. If people want them, though, I'll be happy to turn'em on.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

ISTR they were on for a bit, but were more trouble than they were worth - doing things like converting "(1998)" to "(199    "

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah, yeah, that's right. The implementation was absolutely brainless.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

I have lots of smilies set up: ??????????????????.
I U+2661 Unicode.  (I also U+1F4A9 Unicode.)
-- ∇×V

[Labster]

Bump for the new boards, because my last post above is an example of the problem.

I actually had some emoji that I just posted in another thread, but apparently they don't save.  Everything looked right in preview, though, so it ate them on page save.

I think I know the problem, because I've seen it at work.  The backend is mysql, which means the encoding is probably set to utf8, which naturally for mysql, can't actually hold all utf8 codepoints.  Emoji live on the astral plane, and need more than 3 bytes.  Can you change the encoding of the post text columns to utf8mb4 so I can actually post emoji?

[Bob Schroeck]

Let me check.

ETA: Yes, I can. utf8mb4 is available. I'm not going to do it right now because I'm sleepy and don't want to make a mistake. By the end of the day, after a few coffees.

[Labster]

Did this happen??

[Bob Schroeck]

Not yet. I just put it on the "To Do" thread yesterday to remind me to do it.