Support for Emojis

Discuss requests for comments/changes posted in the Issue Tracker for the development of phpBB. Current releases are 3.2/Rhea and 3.3/Proteus.
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martti
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by martti »

Even without knowing the answer of EmojiOne, is in the spirit of or in accordance with the policy of phpBB to have this functionality in core? EmojiOne doesn't use a standardized license; they can change it anytime (as stated) and it's proprietary, restricting it the use (as opposed to the free software GPLv2 license that phpBB has).

I can't even submit an extension to the database with a MIT license (like Symfony and jQuery), because it's not in accordance with the phpBB policy. :jesus:

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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by GanstaZ »

Why all this fuzz about in core or not this and that? As i see it, you are good at coding, disable emojis and all will be good.

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martti
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by martti »

I have an answer from EmojiOne on how the emojis are used currently in phpBB:
HI Martti,

Thank you for your patience. It looks like phpBB is in the clear since it's only using the free assets for display but not including them for redistribution. We plan to make changes to our Free Licensing Terms to reflect this type of usage. It is not open source projects that we are trying to make our emojis unavailable for, it's the redistribution of our assets. I hope this helps clear things up a bit and feel free to shoot us an email back if you have any other questions.

Best wishes,
Lisa
EmojiOne | JoyPixels
I've sent them now an email back asking about the attribution (for the record).

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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by 3Di »

martti wrote: Thu Apr 12, 2018 9:04 pm I have an answer from EmojiOne on how the emojis are used currently in phpBB:
HI Martti,

Thank you for your patience. It looks like phpBB is in the clear since it's only using the free assets for display but not including them for redistribution. We plan to make changes to our Free Licensing Terms to reflect this type of usage. It is not open source projects that we are trying to make our emojis unavailable for, it's the redistribution of our assets. I hope this helps clear things up a bit and feel free to shoot us an email back if you have any other questions.

Best wishes,
Lisa
EmojiOne | JoyPixels
I've sent them now an email back asking about the attribution (for the record).
Well, it seems what I posted here
3Di wrote: Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:44 pm It seems to me martti you are bound to make bigger something that could be easily dealt with. IMHO.
Let's examine the facts/license. https://www.emojione.com/licenses/free#attribution

* Free license allows for use of non-vector (PNG) icons, up to 128px - in fact ( https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/emojione/asset ... 4/2764.png )

* May not redistribute assets - no one he's doing that, in fact are served via CDN.

* May not include icons in open source projects ( no icons are included, see above)

* Free license requires proper attribution ... (... In the footer of every page where emoji are shown ... )
.. here there is something to do as a matter of fact, simply placing in the overall_footer.html file an extra line of credits IMO. Thoughts?

Not to mention we are on the issue reported as to fix a thing about the CDN's delivery settings.
Reflects exactly what the guys over there told you. And yes, the attribution is the only thing IMO which needs further clarifications.

Remains to "fix" the bit about the CDN stuff, I am following the evolution of this topic prior to create a PR which could include that attribution part as well, in case.

Thanks.
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martti
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by martti »

3Di wrote: Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:27 pmReflects exactly what the guys over there told you.
Because of my question to them, they've understood their license is unclear. That's why they are going to change it.

Then remains:

Does phpBB want to include emojis? I don't think that's good. phpBB should not be trying to be one tool for everything. (There was a nice topic about this, about 5 years ago or so, which gave raise to the "official extensions". But I can't find it.) Rather phpBB should be an efficient toolbox, where the admin can put in whatever tools (extensions) he/she likes to use. In the case of emojis, the admin can chose by means of choosing an extension:
  • Emojis from the users' system (browser, OS)
  • Emojis from EmojiOne with their proprietary license and attribution link in the footer - If EmojiOne is moved to an extension, the phpBB core itself would not be promoting the proprietary, redistributing limiting EmojiOne.
  • Using another proprietary emoji-set of choice.
  • Using an open source emoji-set of preference and where it is possible to load them from the own server (For security. That was the issue, how the emojis came on my radar. - Before short I didn't even know what "an emoji" was).
  • No emojis
By the way:
JoshyPHP wrote: ... Mozilla's emoji are not actively maintained. As far as I know, the only two open source emoji sets being actively maintained are Twitter's Twemoji and Google's Noto emoji. Twemoji receives frequent updates and their smiley faces look nice but the persons emoji are less than awesome. ...
I don't find "actively maintained" an important criterium. It can be that the work is considered completed.

More important I consider:
  • the license
  • the design
  • the available file formats

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DavidIQ
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by DavidIQ »

I think you're confused about what this emoji support added actually is. When you add an emoji to a post it is stored as a utf-8 mb4 character. The post_text column encoding was modified to accommodate this type of data (before this change it would actually throw an error in previous versions). However this meant that each OS would just interpret these characters on their own and add the system's style of emoji.

Based on your replies it appears that you are unaware that turning off EmojiOne will not actually disable emojis from showing up. The whole point of the s9e text formatter using the EmojiOne library, or really any other system using such a library for the emojis is so they look consistent across devices and OSes.
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by 3Di »

martti wrote: Fri Apr 13, 2018 8:52 am Because of my question to them, they've understood their license is unclear. That's why they are going to change it.
That's not what I read here
It looks like phpBB is in the clear since it's only using the free assets for display but not including them for redistribution. We plan to make changes to our Free Licensing Terms to reflect this type of usage. It is not open source projects that we are trying to make our emojis unavailable for, it's the redistribution of our assets.
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by GanstaZ »

The mess about emoji as i understand is about cdpr up-coming rules and attribution question. How do we violate it if only thing we get is a absolute path to .png file, there should be no data collection from that cdn site? If that attribution can only be solved by adding short line of code to footer, then it's ok i guess, but would prefer a title tag instead.

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martti
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by martti »

DavidIQ wrote: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:13 pm I think you're confused about what this emoji support added actually is. When you add an emoji to a post it is stored as a utf-8 mb4 character. The post_text column encoding was modified to accommodate this type of data (before this change it would actually throw an error in previous versions). However this meant that each OS would just interpret these characters on their own and add the system's style of emoji.
I had to look that up: utf8mb4 is actually MySQL's specific name what everybody else is calling utf8.
DavidIQ wrote: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:13 pm Based on your replies it appears that you are unaware that turning off EmojiOne will not actually disable emojis from showing up. The whole point of the s9e text formatter using the EmojiOne library, or really any other system using such a library for the emojis is so they look consistent across devices and OSes.
Turning of the EmojiOne insert would be better as the basic option (the core). Just using the emojis of the OS/browser is a good solution. Anything else is trying to do too much.
And is actually creating inconsistency inside the same device at the moment: the keyboard emojis (using a mobile device) and the emojis inserted in text field for posting differ from the emojis that are forced by phpBB (preview and posted):

Image posting text field and keyboard (all the same emojis from OS or browser)

Image preview and keyboard (emojis differ)

Having the basic option, admins still can opt-in for "consistency across devices" by using an extension (and choose the set, license, file-types, etc...)

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DavidIQ
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Re: Support for Emojis

Post by DavidIQ »

I think having an extension to disable the emoji library for the few persons that want to do that is the actual solution to the problem you seem to have with EmojiOne, not having someone spending development time adding another rarely used setting.
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