Today I noticed the supply of emoticons / emojis has just about doubled. I’m posting this both to call other’s attention to the change and to say “Thanks!”
I don’t know how long ago this occurred, but it’s a welcome addition. Not that I use too many of them beside the old standby’s 
and 
Looks about the same as it has been since we moved to Discourse but there do seem to be more people & animal / nature ones. I certainly never noticed RHPS before.
Hmmm
Get 
the 
, 
, just or I’ll 
Stop, just stop or I’ll give you a blow job?
This painting will never be the same for me again.
A whole bunch of random emoji from the set presented to me by my phone. There are squillions of emoji in the Unicode character set; wouldn’t Discourse simply handle them like any other Unicode text?
Edit: once the reply was posted, the emoji looked different, but they’re all there…
Thank you for bringing this helpful information to our attention, @LSLGuy! Emojis often help when words just can’t fully express the deeper meanings one wants to convey in posts. In fact, I wish to pay a little tribute to you for all of your efforts, if I may.
I sincerely 
want to thank LSLGuy for all that he has contributed to the SDMB 
community. His posts are exciting 
, enlightening 
, and often fill me with great emotion 
. They are the types of posts that beg to be written down 
and archived 
for future reference. It’s hard for me to express just how his many contributions 
to this forum make me feel 
. It takes person with a certain intelligence 
and seriousness 
to create posts of this caliber 
, and LSLGuy is just that kind of guy 
.
I’m obviously pulling your 
, LSLGuy. You are, in fact, one of the SDMB good 
! Keep up the good work! 
I genuinely don’t know exactly how all that works. Certainly Unicode text is just Unicode text and any modern device and modern browser ought to be able to enter and render any of it. Including emoji.
Recognizing that emoji aren’t a font; they’re Unicode code points, but the rendering of any specific code point e.g. the Unicode code point for “smiling pile of poo” totally is device dependent. So akin to the issues with how various fonts are implemented by different vendors, when I post something with an emoji in it I can’t know exactly what users on different device types will see.
Discourse handles the non-emoji emoticons differently. The things like which is entered as “:slight_smile :”. Or even which is entered as “;)”.
These are rendered back not as Unicode code point emojis but as an inline ref (i.e. HTML <img …> tag) to an image file stored on Discourse’s CDN someplace. So they are not a Unicode code point. This is true even if there are similar images (e.g. generic smiling face) available as Unicode code points. Since they are images, the problem of different devices seeing different renderings goes away. But at the same time, then Discourse’s admins are the people curating the supply of those images by choosing which to make available, where to store them, and whether / how they configure the edit box popup menu to display them. This change in Discourse-curated emoticons was the topic of my OP.
Given the Discourse’s picklist is vastly smaller than the totality of current Unicode code points, I think the editor support is really mostly emoticon images. Although any poster’s browser is free to enable full(-er?) emoji input and any reader’s browser is free to support full(-er?) emoji rendering in addition to the emoticon images.
Yes, the SDMB is quite a barnyard. Hard to know who to classify as a turkey and who a pig.
Thanks for the kind pictures. … I think. Where’s the icon with the question marks over the head when you need it?
And yes, I’m kidding too.