New Emoji Package?

[quinnicus]

Hello there Lithium

I am a SuperUser of one of your fine forums - I do admit I have a love/hate relationship with Lithium forums. 

However there is one thing that has been bugging me for quite some time, its the Emojies.  I am unsure whether its up to you guys to develop/implement or my own community developers.  However it is in my humble opinion they do need a substantial refresh and modernisation.  Not too long ago Google did this on its Android system - maybe you guys can too?  Even go a step further and implement animated emojies?

Cheers

PS: Forgive me if I posted this in the wrong area 🙂

[JoeC]

Always nice to hear from a superuser, @quinnicus -- you folks make the world go round.

I was just thinking about this topic today when I was adjusting my Slack settings, where you can choose Apple style, Google style, Twitter style, or Emoji one style for your emojis there, which I thought was cool.

This request has also come in via our customer-only site for suggesting product enhancements. I would recommend that you add your vote there, but since it's not accessible to the public, I put in a vote on your behalf.   

[quinnicus]

Hello @JoeC

Thank you very much for your kind words as well as a vote on my behalf - appreciated !!

Cheers

[mrkevanlin]

Yes! I agree with the OP that the emoji's should be updated, that would be awesome!

[doug_ebay]

@quinnicus great point and totally aggree!

The eBay Community is looking into Emojione.com emojis, which have been implemented in other Lithium communities.

Look at Emojione.com

Lithium used emojione emogis in  https://www.dropboxforum.com

http://emojione.com/licensing/

How do I integrate Emoij One into my app or web-site?

Setup requires the installation of our development kit. Instructions are available within the kit. In short, there is a client side and server side option available. We recommend the assistance of a programmer and/or server administrator to properly configure it to your needs. There’s also a simpler implementation available for those who want to add some emoji to their website without using any scripts. Please head over to our Developers Page for more information.

From <http://emojione.com/faq/>

[euan_cobb]

+1 for the need for new emojis! the one's in the platform are pretty old school as well as there not being enough of them!

My community is B2B and emoji use is fairly low and even then a number of people have commented on the strange emoji selection.

 

[esolomon]

Hi! I don't have access yet to that page you mentioned for customers only, though I'm definitely a customer. I would love to vote for updated emoji usage in Lithium! Can you put in a vote for me as well, please? Thanks!

[ClaudiusH]

One thing to be aware is that all mobile 📱 keyboards already support easy insertion of emojis into messages 💬.

And on computers 🖥️ 💻  emojis are also just a few clicks or a keyboard ⌨️ shortcut away:

• Windows 10: Use the touch keyboard as visually explained here: http://blog.getemoji.com/emoji-keyboard-windows
• Mac: Press Control–Command–Space bar: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201586
• Pre-Windows 10: Emojione offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Opera: http://emojione.com/chrome/

💡With this trend mainstream arrival of emoji use via keyboards I wonder if it's still worth investing much in the traditional emoticons. 🤔 I think they can add a lot of value if you have emoticons that are on brand (e.g. check out the Skype emoticons the Skype Community), but I think there's even an argument to completely remove 🕳️ the community emoticons. 😮

[Fellsteruk]

My users do like the ease of clicking a button in the WYSIWYG to select their emoji but i agree about removing them... In fact the lithium ones are so poor old and i get so many complaints about them from my users that i'm requesting for them to be removed from the editor until there is a better version or until user shortcuts and add-ons become more acceptable in my community this may take a while 😞 

🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈 🙈

[ClaudiusH]

---

doug_ebay wrote:

The eBay Community is looking into Emojione.com emojis, which have been implemented in other Lithium communities.

Look at Emojione.com

Lithium used emojione emogis in  https://www.dropboxforum.com

---

@doug_ebay If you can properly attribute Emojione you can already today simply replace the Lithium stock emoticons by them (which I assume is what was done for the Dropbox Forums). Take a look at the article 'Can I modify the emoticons in my Community'.

[Fellsteruk]

didnt know you could do that @ClaudiusH

"quickly runs off to change case from remove emoji to edit....."

[quinnicus]

Hi all

A special shout out to @doug_ebay and @ClaudiusH 😁

I have installed the EmojiOne 🔥🦊 extention - it works brilliantly (although a little slow).  Now to convince my community manager to have this in our community.

😍 it !!

------

Unsure if its related, but on this forum and on my own community, experiencing this issue (coincidently after installing the firefox extention)

[ClaudiusH]

---

quinnicus wrote:

Unsure if its related, but on this forum and on my own community, experiencing this issue (coincidently after installing the firefox extention)

---

This is caused by the EmojiOne browser extension. If you enable auto-replacing emojis in your browser with those from EmojiOne in the extension's settings

EmojiOne Chrome extension - Auto-Replace setting

...then the extension will add some HTML code  to overlay above normal Emojis. This conflicts with Lithium's Rich Text Editor's auto-save feature which doesn't accept full HTML. 🤦 So you will keep getting this autosave error. In the extension setting you could exclude certain domains from having the auto-replace applied (e.g. on your Lithium community), but then you would loose the benefit of the extension. 🤷

[quinnicus]

Adding the following link:

https://cmsimpleforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=9430

I believe there is an on-going discussion in the non-public area in regards to this.

[Frida]

With all due respect @JoeC and @ClaudiusH

The request for new, millenial-style emojis set has been floating around for nearly 2 years and Lithium is still not capable of making new sets of emojis available to its customers? Do you seriously expect your paying customers (needless to mention that Lithium is not the cheapest out there) to look out for solutions elsewhere? So by when can we, Lithium customers, expect new emoji sets that can be used with desktop computers?

BR

[Fellsteruk]

Hey @Frida

I get that you're frustrated with the lack of modern emoji's "I was myself" but to be really honest with you, If the look n feel of your emoji's is the most important feature you want to see brought to the platform and the biggest concern in your community then I guess you're doing well! 

As I've said I was also deeply frustrated by the 1980 style emoji's but you know what?  I changed them myself, didn't cost me anything other than a few hours of my time to speak with support, test, tweak and then deploy all without any need to touch code so whilst I get your frustration if it's really causing you an issue update them yourself and with plenty of royalty free emoji's in the world to use, what's stopping you? 

I'm a customer just like you and actually a massive fan & critic of lithium with very high expectations but I'll be honest... In the grand scheme of product features currently outstanding there are 100's of enhancements I'd rather lithium be spending my subscription fee working to deliver than a new set of emoji's especially when lithium have given us all a way to update them ourselves.

[quinnicus]

Hi all

Just to update this thread since I started it - My community of which I am a SuperUser of, has just rolled out its new Emoji package 2 days ago.

I posted the new emojies available in my community in this thread:

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/general-chat/new-emojies/td-p/2331708

For me, I am now happy 😄

Cheers

[Frida]

Hey @Fellsteruk

Thank you for your feedback. Appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Yes, I'm frustrated. Not because of the lack of emojis but because I regard Lithium as quite slow regarding adapting to market changes and customer requirement. You beautifully got to the heart of the issue: For the money we spend I don't feel spending "hours of my time to speak with support, test, tweak and then deploy". If you can afford spending valuable time on this kind of tasks, which should be part of the standard service, then your community is doing far better than ours  Believe me, I'm struggling with other issues on our community which are surely more important than emojis (e.g. emojis aren't working at all, task open for weeks now, buggy page view count, new blog does not adhere to basic SEO requirements, etc.). I simply wonder, if emojis is such a simple task, why does it take ages to make them available to customers? Doesn't make me feel very optimistic for more complex tasks...

Cheers

[BrianOblinger]

🤔

Realistically, it no longer makes sense for Lithium or any other vendor that provides post editors to invest in custom emoji support. The Unicode standard is deeply rooted in all modern operating systems and is understood by most users as the definitive mechanism of adding emoji to their communications. Furthermore, new emojis are being added all the time to the standard and are rolled out regularly via OS updates (I do think that desktop operating systems could do a better job of making emojis more accessable in their interfaces, but that's for Microsoft, Google, and Apple to figure out).📱🖥💻⌨️

This is analogous to the discussion around spellcheckers in the post editor. Now that modern browsers and operating systems have spellchecking technology built-in, there's no reason for post editors to supply their own competing spellchecking experience. To continue development would be to swim against the current. ✅

In short, I'd prefer that Lithium allocate development resources to new features and functions that are additive rather than trying to battle standards that most consumers have accepted and use every day. 👍🏻💸