Mattermost-server: Change emoji's color

[Apjue]

With Mattermost 4.1, emojis changed. Some users (like me) don't like that
For example, all "hand" emojis turned yellow, instead of usual white
A way to change the color (in user's settings) of this kind of emojis like Slack does would be cool

[hmhealey]

Hi @S6066,

We changed it to yellow since it's a neutral skin tone. I don't believe we're planning on supporting alternate skin tones yet, but feel free to make a suggestion on our Feature Ideas forum so we can gauge community interest when prioritizing changes

[h-town]

Hi @S6066,

We changed it to yellow since it's a neutral skin tone. I don't believe we're planning on supporting alternate skin tones yet, but feel free to make a suggestion on our Feature Ideas forum so we can gauge community interest when prioritizing changes

TIL Jaundice is a neutral skin tone

[p3k]

maybe it’s the right time now to change this behaviour. it is very irritating to see the correct display of the emojis in the editor and then get a uniform look in the actual post. black emojis matter(most)!

[hmhealey]

Hi @p3k. Thanks for the report!

That actually appears to be a bug. This issue was filed back when we changed our default emoji images to all be yellow since a handful of random emojis had previously had different skin tones.

Nowadays, we're a bit behind on the emojis that we support, but all the ones that we do support should include full skin tone support outside of the emoji picker (which I believe we also have a ticket open for). I don't know why this one in particular isn't working since the text form of it works (:fist_raised_dark_skin_tone:) and other emojis like 👍🏾 render in Mattermost correctly using both the unicode and text forms. We did previously have a similar bug where some gendered emojis were rendering with the incorrect gender, so perhaps this is related.

I've filed a Jira ticket to look into this more.

[hmhealey]

I found out what the issue was. It had to do with an ancient bug in the code that converts unicode into the names that emoji image files are stored under, and it only affected a few older emojis such as this one and the raised hand emoji (✋).

There's a PR to fix it here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp/pull/5818

Thanks again for the report!

[p3k]

Thanks for the quick action, @hmhealey very much appreciated.