Hi Webmaster - I’ve noticed that in order to respond to a PM from someone with special characters or emojis, you must first delete the emojis or special characters for the message to send. Otherwise, you get an error. For example, I cannot send messages to Mr. E unless I delete the umlaut in his name. Likewise, no one can send a PM to me unless they delete my cats (and my cats don’t like to be deleted). Is this fixable? Emily
Posted by
California USA
4276 posts
I’ve found this annoying too with several people I’ve tried to respond to. Is there a reason that people can add emojis to their profile but it’s not actually part of their name in the message system and prevents a quick response without deleting cats, globes, flags, etc?
Posted by
Portland, OR
660 posts
Sounds like the Profiles can handle Unicode while the messages are restricted to a more limited set.
When you send messages the software processes them to remove some things that can act like little "programs". That's why a lot of systems (like this one) stop you from using the "angle brackets" like "<" that enclose words.
There's some trickery you can use with Unicode so a lot of systems restrict it as mentioned. But allowing it in profiles is confusing.
Posted by
Republic of Texas / U.S.A. / Magyarország / Budapest
23731 posts
Emily. You and I both figured it out. Tge others will too. I'm afraid the big bad wolf will take our emoji away!!!
Posted by
California Central Coast 🐚
361 posts
My emoji is after my location. I wonder if it's the same issue.
Posted by
near San Francisco
6013 posts
Yes, it's anything in a "reply."
Posted by
near San Francisco
6013 posts
The others will too
Some may have figured it out and decided it wasn't worth the trouble for anyone sending a reply having to delete them.
Posted by
Sacramento, California U.S.A.
11158 posts
When replying to a PM it is easy to delete the emoji or anything else that causes a problem before you send it. I added an emoji to my name when I noticed multiple other Andrea’s on the forum. There weren’t any others when I joined many years ago and there’s probably a handful of them now.
Posted by
Minnesota🌲
10224 posts
My emoji is after my location. I wonder if it's the same issue.
No, it's not affected because (as mentioned by CWSocial) it's only in the reply because the name (and accompanying emoji) are both present. The location is not in the reply so it is not affected.
For any newcomers, the reason for this is that the tech team removed the ability to post emojis due to abusive posts by spammers that were filled with them. And because a PM reply uses the same software as a post does, you can't reply with an emoji.
FWIW, you can occasionally sneak one of the more unique emojis in, but I would imagine that is because they are not in the system's database (or whatever it's called). ☺︎