Display Name Mangles Modern Emoji

There are ~3600 RGI (recommended for general interchange) emoji according to Unicode. These are emoji that you can input with an emoji keyboard.

~1350 of these emoji [1] use a ZWJ (U+200D) character as they are composed of multiple Unicode codepoints.

Discord Display Name incorrectly removes these characters resulting in confusion and potential spoofs.

🐈‍⬛ "Black Cat" emoji is 3-characters and contains a ZWJ. Discord currently replaces this sequence with :black_cat:

However, 😵‍💫 "Face with Spiral Eyes" emoji is mangled and turned into two separate emoji: 😵+💫

This is not a new Unicode feature. 👨‍💻 "Man Technologist" has been in Unicode since UTS #51 version 4.0 which was released in 2016 and is not usable in Display Names. (ZWJ Emoji were introduced in 2015.)

IMO, getting this correct is critical for online identity as 33% of emoji are sequences and many of them are mangled when used in Display Names.

Either, Display Name should be UTS-51 [2] compliant and permit all RGI emoji, or there should be equivalent :xyz: substitutions that preserve the intended emoji but remove the ZWJ from the name.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/Public/emoji/15.0/emoji-zwj-sequences.txt
[2] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/

Commenti