Mattermost-server: Emoji doesn't include gender-neutral variants

[clarfonthey]

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Summary

Emoji require usage of gender variants and does not allow gender-neutral variants.

Expected behavior

Unicode emoji added gender variants (e.g. :man_shrugging: and :woman_shrugging:), but there are still gender-neutral variants available. Despite the fact that most emoji sets do not include gender-neutral variants, the fact that shortcodes cannot be used for gender-neutral variants (e.g. :shrugging:) is counter-intuitive and requires a user to pick the gender of their shrug, profession, or zombie in order to post an emoji. In the raw unicode representation, this will omit the gender variant, and for clients that show system emoji, this will use that variant from the font instead.

Observed behavior (that appears unintentional)

Right now a lot of common emoji (like :shrugging:) require gender variants like (:man_shrugging:) and (:woman_shrugging:).

Possible fixes

This should be as straightforward as modifying the contents of model/emoji_data.go to match an emoji shortcode list which includes gender-neutral variants. I know for a fact that GitHub's list has these problems, and the list may be the same as the one GitHub uses.

[amyblais]

Thanks, appreciate your feedback @clarfon.

Would you like to contribute this in the feature idea forum so it can be discussed, upvoted and considered for a help wanted ticket?

Please include a link back to this GitHub issue. If you're interested in implementing, please say so and we'll prioritize the review. You get 10 votes in the feature idea forum, and each one influences the future of the project.

[amyblais]

I'll close this issue for now, but I hope you are open to creating a feature request issue and we can then track this request there,

[clarfonthey]

Hi,

I consider this a bug, not a request for a new feature, but I can try to get around to posting that at some point.