Comment by codetrotter
6 years ago
> the blacklist appears to be incomplete
I was under the impression that the emojis that are not blacklisted are intentionally whitelisted.
For example, all of the flag emojis are possible to use. That seems to be no coincidence.
There are a few others that are possible to use as well, most of which appear to be logically grouped together.
For example, multiple emojis relating to time are possible to use.
The flags make sense I think. And I could see the ones relating to time being sort of relevant in post titles about time management for example.
For some reason, some of the symbols resembling media playback controls are possible to use too.
I don't see any reason for the media playback controls symbols to be available (while so many others are blacklisted I mean), but it does make the following possible though:
"This is so sad. Alexa, play Despacito 2."
Now playing: Despacito 2 (feat. Eminem)
⏯ ⏮ ⏭ —————————○—————— (2:01 / 3:14)
Not that there is any immediate practical use of that of course.
I think it would be interesting if the mods would comment on which emojis and other symbols outside of human writing systems are available and if indeed that is intended or not, and if intended what they are expecting people to use them for and why they decided to whitelist exactly those that they did while still blacklisting a few of the other ones that might be useful.
It might just be like you said also though, maybe they explicitly blacklisted some symbols only and then more symbols were introduced later and the blacklist was never updated to include those.
That can't be the (only) explanation, since according to Emojipedia the play/pause button was introduced in Emoji 1.0.
Flags work also: 🇯🇵 🇰🇷 🇩🇪 🇨🇳 🇺🇸
Techies at theregister.co.uk told me mysql cant persist some types of utf8 chars in their forums. Its not deliberate but common emojis dont work there too. Anyone know if HN uses mysql?
News, the software behind HN, doesn't, no. The filter for emojis is deliberate.
MySQL has multiple Unicode character sets. The one named "utf8" doesn't support all of utf8, but utf8mb4 supports it all.
mysql `utf8` is only 3 byte -- you have to specify something different that `utf8` to get full utf8 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-unicode-sets...
I can attest MySQL 8.0 eats up emoji characters with no fuss.
HN doesn't even use a database.