Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Option to Remove Emoticons!

Heyo! Back with another. Dang, two of them? Go me.

Anyways, the emojis are so fun and all but I rally just like the classic feel of plain old : ) not
unfortunately, as you can see, the emoji is triggered so you can't see the semicolon and parenthesis

maybe under profile settings or something there's a little checkbox or a toggle to turn off emoticons? that way it's not hard to find under the profile settings

maybe somewhere under general settings or comfort and privacy?

just thinking out loud

...dangit.

: 3

EDITED: bc katia is right lmao, im not anti emoticons

double edit: : 3

You might want to change your title as when I read it, I assumed you wanted to remove all emoticons from the site. Perhaps you could change it to: Option to remove emoticons?

Onto the suggestion itself, I would be all for people being able to disable emotes if they want to.

yyyyyeah. just fixed it

dangit

Why are you waging a war on the tiny yellow bois? How rude. They do their best to make our lives more colorful and expressive

Jokes aside I support freedom to choose so if it's possible I think it's a good idea to be able to turn it on/off! I'd personally absolutely love it if the site emoticons were more like those for phones but that's just my preference 🧐

I agree, I would like the option to not have text emoticons turn into the image ones. Aside from the general "I like the regular text ones better" (which I do), there's also the fact that only some characters in a group of them will get turned into an emoticon, which is usually convenient, like if you want a inside parenthesis () but not so convenient when you try to type an emoticon that doesn't technically exist, and it turns part of the text into one but not the rest of it. (The example I had in mind for this was > - yeah, that happens. Not a major issue but a tiny bit unfortunate for sure.)
another thing that might be neat would be a way to control which text gets turned into an emoticon, so someone could use some of them in a message, but not for everything. like, if one had to type something specific for text to be turned into an emoticon (similar to how on Discord one can surround an emoji name with :: to get it to put in the actual emoji. (and also like the one here)) (... and I mean, I know typing or is already "typing something specific" as I said- but uh, articulating words is hard apparently so I hope I conveyed what I meant anyway - typing something extra specific in order to differentiate between : ) and )

I know that there's an option to prevent text from converting to emoticons in your character profile widgets, and it does make sense to have that here, too. I'm not sure what the load on the site might end up from it, though, since it'd have to be done per-post (even if there's a setting to make the checkbox default one way or another). I have no idea how emoticons are handled by things like screen readers, but giving an account a universal shutoff could make other peoples' posts end up looking weirder or coming across the wrong way if they were counting on one thing to display and something else does instead. Some folks will read the text versions differently from each other, too, while an image tends to be read more consistently (but text versions can also allow some tuning in the expressions; for example, I intend a slightly different "intonation" when I use ^^ vs ^ _ ^ vs ^__^, and one variation becomes ). The text for emoticons can also sometimes end up broken across multiple lines when left as text, so that something to keep in mind.

The "like those for phones" thing is super vague. You'll find different emoticons from different manufacturers, sometimes different phone models, in different programs.... And some even show up differently for different people looking at the same comment. So it's probably good to specify more clearly what you mean. A lot of phones will also reference character encoding sets that kinda force a specific icon to show up, too, as happened with 🧐(and in the preview I see, the yellow part is barely visible against the background), so technically that's already an option for anyone who can dig up the right encoding (which does not actually require a phone) - but those are also a case where browsers won't always display the same image, especially since some icon sets are proprietary.

An aside, for anyone not sure about which emoticons are built into RPR and how to display them, there's a reference in the Help documentation.