Why can't I use certain Unicode characters on Hacker News?

8 points·TazeTSchnitzel··3 comments

I tried to use some here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156891

But they were silently and automatically stripped from my post.

We made the software strip some ranges of Unicode chars because people were abusing them as gimcracks to grab attention to their posts. HN has always been a nearly plain text site and we don't want that to change.

What you tried to post sounds legit, but it's hard to get this perfect for all occasions. Maybe we'll look into refining it a bit.

Testing:

I tried to use the smiley face emoji 'SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH' (U+1F603) on the preceding line. This is non-BMP, so maybe that's why it's stripped.

Testing:

Here I tried to use the smiley face emoji 'WHITE SMILING FACE' (U+263A) on the preceding line. This is BMP, so why is it stripped?

Testing: naïveté

Hmm, at least HN supports some very basic diacritics.

Testing: ありがとう

Japanese works? Yet not smiley faces. Odd.

There's not much to gain with smiley faces. In the best case they accompany a statement that is already kind/appropriate/respectful. In the worst case, they are used to excuse statements that are not, pretend something mean is a joke, or otherwise "soften the blow".

On the other hand, supporting other languages can add to HN because: 1. not everybody is a native English speaker: 2. Some ideas are not accurately and/or efficiently conveyed in English.

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