tbh if we're going for formatting in forum posts, I'd rather have Markdown than BBCode...
The point is I don't have access to the server. Markdown is a server thing. For unicode I only need an external editor and I can post nicely formatted text using existing facilities.
This idea has definite positive feedback with members:
https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/insert-bold--italic--smiley-to-your-forum-posts
It is up to the site whether to address an existing need or leave this to user creativity. I just wanted to convey this existing interest to the developers.
Emojis are fine, but abusing unicode characters is a terrible way to do text formatting.
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tbh if we're going for formatting in forum posts, I'd rather have Markdown than BBCode...