You must not say duck

[Freddino18]

ummm it is very possible and good for scrubbing afterward

[phillip1882]

meh i'm lazy when it comes to cleaning

[Sean Quixote]

[phillip1882]

i have no idea what that represents.

[ratammer]

He's trying to spell out the forbidden word in flag emoji, I think. Luckily the scoreboard wouldn't count that.

[Sean Quixote]

Yeah, Unicode is pretty weird sometimes. Presumably, those boxed letter characters were at some point considered something that someone would find useful, but then** someone else apparently decided, "hey, let's use that block so that certain pair combos of them will render as a national flag", and so now you can't reliably use them to spell words anymore.

** (or, maybe it could've happened the other way around, what do I know...)

[chridd]

Pretty sure they originated as a way to create flags (or rather, "regional indicator symbols", which in theory could be some other way to represent a country, but in practice I've only seen flags). Boxed letters is just a fallback, so if you enter an invalid country code (or a new country code that your emoji font doesn't support yet, or your emoji font doesn't have full support for flags) it'll show something and maybe you'll be able to have some idea what it's supposed to be.

(That is, isn't supposed to look like boxed D, boxed U; it's supposed to look like the flag of the country with code "du", but it doesn't have an image of that flag so it shows boxed letters instead. It's like the flag equivalent of the broken image icon or those boxes that appear when someone uses a character your font doesn't support.)

[Sean Quixote]

Uhhh, right. I prolly should've realized that when I was literally on the Wikipedia page for that Unicode block and it was called "regional indicator symbols", heh... (I just searched for "emoji letters" and didn't pay much more attention than that.)

(Also, yeah, inb4 anyone chooses to point out that those characters may not really count as actual "emoji"... It's close enough for me. If it looks more like an image file than a text character, then my brain just says "emoji".)

Also, ⅆ℧ℂK.

[chridd]

On my computer, the characters themselves don't look like emoji (they're the same color as the surrounding text, not multi-colored).

[Sean Quixote]

Huh. Wait. Really? Does your mouse pointer turn into a cursor when you hover over them, too? (The "" part, in case that wasn't clear. I'll go ahead and assume the flag part itself is literally rendered as an image file.......??)

For me they're all .svg images. I also opened them in a new tab, and noticed they're being provided by some javascript CDN thingy. And, I assumed it was the forum that was doing this -- but, maybe is it my Firefox that's actually doing it? Shrug.


Testing...


edit: yep, those are all .svg images for me

moar edit: also,

[ratammer]

How Sean's post looked to me:

[Sean Quixote]

Curiouser and curiouser. What's the broken image?

[ratammer]

It's what would be the "DU" flag if there was one, I assume.

[chridd]

It looks like whatever part of the forum software handles emojis doesn't actually check if the flag is a real flag, so it just generates broken images. But the images have alt text with the regional indicator characters, so they're displaying as text (possibly next to a broken image icon, depending on the browser).

Testing with smilies disabled (so no images):
🇩🇺 🇨🇰

[ratammer]

I see little letters.

[Sean Quixote]

Testing with smilies disabled (so no images):

Hey! You did the thing!


Also, duck!

[chridd]

Hey! You did the thing!

Did what thing?

Also,

[ratammer]

[chridd]

I didn't put the word in my post, if that's what you thought. I'm pretty sure regional indicator characters don't count as letters, and besides, I put a space in the middle just in case.

[ratammer]

I was reacting to Sean's post.

[heuristically_alone]

React

[ratammer]

To act again.

[Sean Quixote]

Did what thing?

THe thing you said you did basically, lol. I was just briefly blown away by the fact that disabling smilies caused my mouse pointer to react differently to hovering over the characters... but, whatever underlying softwares may or may not be doing much of anything differently with respect to how they're rendered.

[heuristically_alone]

[chridd]

I was reacting to Sean's post.

I was adding to my response to Sean's post. I thought maybe he thought what I'd written counted as the forbidden word.

THe thing you said you did basically, lol. I was just briefly blown away by the fact that disabling smilies caused my mouse pointer to react differently to hovering over the characters... but, whatever underlying softwares may or may not be doing much of anything differently with respect to how they're rendered.

The forum software turns emojis into images, so the browser treats them as images (including using the arrow cursor when pointing to them). Disabling smilies disables that, so the emoji are just sent as text.