In response to a number of reports of ‘lost’ posts or errors when trying to post:
Further investigation has shown that one of the causes of this issue is due to use of ‘emoji’ emoticons provided by some keyboard plugins commonly found on Apple and Android phones and tablets, which looks something like this:
[[{"fid":"20953","view_mode":"media_original","type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"emoji keyboard","title":"emoji keyboard","height":163,"width":240,"class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]
Unfortunately, most of these emoji characters are currently unsupported by our website (for those more technically minded, they use a type of encoding not supported by our database). While this is something we may be able to address in future, until such time, you should avoid using these characters in your posts.
We do however provide our own selection of emoticons that you can use freely, which are available in the forum’s text editor toolbar:
[[{"fid":"20947","view_mode":"media_original","type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Emoticon icon in forum toolbar","title":"Emoticon icon in forum toolbar","height":88,"width":406,"class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]
It’s also worth noting that even where the emoji characters are supported by the website in question, that these characters will display differently, and sometimes not at all, for the end user depending on which browser, operating system and device they are using (for example older versions of Windows will not display them). So if you want to make sure you’re conveying the emotion you want to in your posts, it’s best to use the emoticons provided in our toolbar anyway!