This has probably been suggested before but this suggestion includes new information regarding the new comment emojis.

Now that this type of comment emoji exists, it would make sense to use them in the forums as well. The current forum smilies are old styled and have nothing to do with Scratch. They appear to just be icons that are included with DjangoBB. I suggest that they and the other old comment emojis be included in the forums. I would also like to see the forum formatting bar icons restyled to fit Scratch.

I also suggest that the codes for these emojis in the forum be the same as in the comments (using underscores). The current codes are text emoticons, resulting in being unable to use text emoticons such as :) without the unintended and “hacky” workaround of placing empty formatting code between the characters. Additionally, the “Hmm” smiley can get in the way when discussing URLs with unusual protocols (ex. the Chrome settings page is found at chrome/settings).

Support.

I agree that the forum emojis should be updated, but I think using BBCode might be best. I don't know much about it, but it seems like if they managed to customize the code for the scratchblocks, it would make more sense to just do a new code in that format than to make it understand the underscores. Maybe something like…
for ,
for
…well, you get the picture.

I think they should be updated as well. I don't see any downsides. Emojis have definitely gotten me a little angry and have gotten in the way in the past, so support.

Candylanguagegirl wrote:

I agree that the forum emojis should be updated, but I think using BBCode might be best. I don't know much about it, but it seems like if they managed to customize the code for the scratchblocks, it would make more sense to just do a new code in that format than to make it understand the underscores. Maybe something like…

[smile]

for ,

[grin]

for
…well, you get the picture.

I like candy's idea a little more. The original emojis give a sense of… originality. It'd be cool with BBCode emojis though.

I support this, but I think it would be best not to have emojis in a HTML (or whatever is, forgive my ignorance) style format.

This is because a colon followed by a close bracket : ) might not be intended to be used as an emoji, but the text displays it as an emoji because whenever those characters are next to each other, it is automatically recognised as an emoji.

Candylanguagegirl wrote:

I agree that the forum emojis should be updated, but I think using BBCode might be best. I don't know much about it, but it seems like if they managed to customize the code for the scratchblocks, it would make more sense to just do a new code in that format than to make it understand the underscores. Maybe something like…

[smile]

for ,

[grin]

for
…well, you get the picture.

How about the original code but within brackets instead of underscores ex. [:)]
(trying to make the forum and comment emojis consistent)