Modern Vespa

I see. I thought maybe it was something like that.

not actually about emojis (I do prefer the new)

can you please allow .webp for image types? was trying to attach an image that I had grabbed from a webpage and it was refused. of course I was able to convert to jpg and it worked but though would be no harm if you allowed these

I'll look into it. If ImageMagick supports it (and we're on a slightly older version of ImageMagick as it stands) then it should be do-able. But we would almost certainly convert it to png.

I'd also like to add support for HEIC, but ImageMagick definitely does not support it out of the box at the moment. I can get it if I add some libraries and build the executable myself, but trying not to go to that extreme.

Just wanted to mention that Ironfoot’s contribution of upscaled versions of the animated emoticons had a big impact. With the upscaling task no longer an issue, I was able to focus on coming up with a better system for actually serving those images, delivering original-sized images to older browsers and low-resolution displays, with higher-resolution images going to newer browsers and high-resolution displays.

That system is now in place, so all of the emoticons should be looking a bit sharper now.

A big round of applause for Ironfoot!

This site is the last bastion of Mr Green!

I would have hated to see him go!



I also hate the modern facepalm, the one on here is very Picard

so I'm in the keep camp

Agreed. I’m a big fan of Mr Green. At a minimum, I would have found a way to keep him around. Also agreed. That one wasn’t part of the original “smilies”, as phpBB called them. I added that one myself.

I do see this issue has been tabled, for the moment. Though, you may want to take into consideration a recent article, These are the 3 most misunderstood emojis on the planet

After reading, you may need to take into consideration Generation X, Millennials, and Gen Z and what they find cool/easy, aside of the old farts and fartettes (Greatest, Silent and Boomers) and what they find cool/easy, on this forum.

Please make note, today, July 17, 2021, is World Emoji Day.

Respectfully,
-Old Fartette

I like the animation.

And, on my Macs, new emoticons look meh on Safari, slightly-less meh on Firefox. I prefer the current set.

😂 That sounds like work. Ugh.

Thank Ironfoot for the resolution upgrade.

For this contribution ^, for the MV logo, for the drawing thread (I don't know why it took me so long to see that!), for all of it

Any reason why we can't map :Picard: there?

Done. Though you'll have to use the lowercase form.

This is my new favourite thing.

while you're tinkering with the forum ... any chance of this?

Holy cow, I somehow managed to read through the entire fist page before looking at the dates and realizing this is an old topic.

I just reread this thread, and in my opinion, is one reason I love MV.

I will take a look and see if there's been any movement on ImageMagik.

I spent about 45 minutes googling around and things are still a mess with ImageMagick. Or maybe I'm just too dense to figure it out right now.

The webp format ought to be available, but when I updated the ImageMagick package it didn't seem to be included. That might be because we are running on an ARM server, rather than an Intel server, and so it might be the case that the binaries that support webp haven't been built for ARM. It's unclear.

I confess I'd never heard of webp before. Hey-Ho.

I should stress that even if we could accept file uploads in webp format, we would still convert them to png, simply to maintain compatibility with legacy browsers. So there's not a whole lot of advantage to using webp, unless your camera generates webp by default.

Same goes for HEIC.

I mostly only come across these formats when downloading pics from Instagram* and AliExpress


* I use a modified Instagram app that has no ads and includes a download button instead of having to screenshot a post which down grades the quality and also doesn't work with videos

Is that a big use case?

Google image search spits out a lot of webp, unfortunately.

Modern image servers can be pretty sophisticated, sniffing your browser and serving a more efficient format (like WebP), even if you request something like a GIF.

One workaround is to try the same link in a different browser. For the longest time, Safari didn't support WebP, so you could download GIFs from there. However, it looks like all the major browsers support it now.

As to the original topic, Noto is animated now.

There appear to be good substitutes for most of the existing animated emoji. There are a bunch of really good ones, so give that link a perusal. (Of course, Jess could scale them to match the existing ones - they wouldn't be massive like this.)

Making them scalable like font size could be cool....

Sniffing browsers and serving different images to different browsers falls solidly in the "clever" category, and also in the "unnecessary complexity" category. At least in the context of MV. I'm sure there are contexts where it makes more sense. But our bandwidth bills are not extortionate, and png is so widely supported that it's an obvious choice for a simple solution.

An unstated goal here (that I will now state) is to avoid building something so complex that the part-time and sole maintainer (that's me) can no longer maintain it. In other words, I am quite capable of out-clevering myself, and a lifetime spent writing code has taught me the importance of simplicity over complexity.

I'm also acutely aware now -- in ways that I would not have believed or comprehended when I was 30 or 40 -- that the effects of even a small cognitive decline as one ages will eventually halt my ability to comprehend complex code. It hasn't happened yet, but I can feel it creeping up.

To be clear, that was meant to be a lesson in downloading non-WebP, not advocating for making MV's hosting more complex.

I'd have thought inline drag-and-drop/pastingh photos would be a more commonly used feature than emoticons and seems deserving of attention. I remember bringing this up a few years ago tho don't remember the reason(s) it was difficult/impossible but and tools may have evolved/matured enough to support this feature

I can paste any Apple-embedded emoticons from my iPhone or Mac (Safari) into MV posts without issue and use them to supplement the MV "native" emoticons. I'd imagine the same is true of Windows.

Thanks for the updates Jess 🙏👍🛠

Fair enough. I was explaining the rationale to myself as much as anything.

This is high on my priority list. The biggest obstacle is that it is tied together with an update to the posting / editing mechanism. Just to make things extra complex, the most likely candidate for a new text editor is maintained largely by a Russian group, and I am wary of propagating their javascript to all of your browsers.

I'll revisit the subject in the near future.

I started to feel that effect right around age 50. It was slightly unnerving to look at some 'clever' bit of code optimising that I could no longer make head nor tail of, despite copious annotations.

JimC your old Avatar is still showing on the first page general discussion thread list but not elsewhere.

Yeah, there's a notoriously difficult cacheing issue at play. Not Jim's fault.

I'm working on a solution.

For anyone following the ongoing saga of stubbornly cached avatar thumbnails, the problem should now be resolved. All avatar thumbnails now follow the same pattern as the avatars themselves, which are uniquely named / versioned. Every time you upload a new avatar, the avatar filename changes, and now the avatar thumbnail filename does as well.

This circumvents any cacheing of the files, either on your browser or in the CDN edge locations.

Good sorting! Hope that wasn't too much of a lift.

The code itself wasn't too bad -- the hardest part was creating a new avatar thumbnail for every single user avatar on the site. That took a couple of hours of churn, but it was a mostly automated process.

You might not want to know this... When logged out, I'm seeing old avatar thumbnails. Logging in brings up the new thumbnails, logging out reverts back to the old.