oh how weird! Well it’s weekend, you do it when you can, in the meantime I will use the message board at the top to display a warning to all users 😉 If you need anymore debuggin on my side just leave a message, I am always managing my page of facebook which is quite large, so often at the computer. Tag me (I love this tagging business 😀 ). Ciao!

wp makes checks to ensure that tables can or should be updated…  I dont remember all the details, but in cases where non utf might be in play, they cannot update the db without destroying data…  and of course, if this is the case, you wont be able to use emojis in wp…

@mr-papa  – This database in question IS set to utf-8. It’s a little worrying…

again, that was only one of the conditioins wp checked… dont recall the others…  and they did multiple versions in a row because of difficulties in getting it all to run…

what version of mysql is this?  must be 5.5.3 or higher for mysql to support it…

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/04/02/the-utf8mb4-upgrade/

Ah didn’t know that.

The site is using  5.1.71 – so that looks like the answer.

which means wp wont run emoji stuff on earlier versions… is that something we need to account for?

I lost you both also because I only created a blog under the Altervista platform in Italy whom manages a very big platform for websites and blogs (ran by Banzai). So I did not set the database myself or WP, they came already installed. I made a screenshot which may show the versioning you are talking about.

What do I do next?

your host sets your mysql version… this one is old, but supported by wp…  just not the new multibyte utf charset…

ok, so what is the solution? Do I have to ask the support of my provider if they can update the mysql version?

Well, don’t know… Afraid I have lost the bubble where andy was heading with questions..

At Bar for happy hour now 🙂 will try to re-read whole thread later tonight in hotel room…  Worst case andy will be back in AM…

But would think things would function unless someone tried to enter an emoji  

For when you will read this 😉

1. On the support forum of my host someone asked about possible future upgrade of mysql and the support said they have this in their todos but not a date yet. I guess it will take some major planning as a change of the db version may have a big impact and my host has thousand of websites and blogs. So I don’t think they will do it that soon. Nevertheless one of the guys there is my good friends and I will ask him.

2. It may be a good idea if I try other plugins, such as bbpress, I can create quickly a test environment (my host is free) which I wanted to do for my forum anyway, put bbpress and see what happens from a mobile phone when inserting an emoji. Just to check if they have the same problem or not 😀

3. In any case I think, from my days of programmer, that if you say that simple:press works with WP 4.2 then you should cater for people using emoji. You cannot tell people: “oh by the way the mysql must be this version”: a lot of people creating a forum with a plugin probably don’t know which db version the host has.So I think the easiest is put some code which, if mysql is not the right version, will ignore the emoji. That would make your plugin robust, I think, but that’s only my opinion 😉

Sunday here, and more that sunny, I hope I rest so I will bother you guys less today 😀

Giovanna said

3. In any case I think, from my days of programmer, that if you say that simple:press works with WP 4.2 then you should cater for people using emoji. You cannot tell people: “oh by the way the mysql must be this version”: a lot of people creating a forum with a plugin probably don’t know which db version the host has.So I think the easiest is put some code which, if mysql is not the right version, will ignore the emoji. That would make your plugin robust, I think, but that’s only my opinion 😉

i think you state the obvious. The research to do this started yesterday.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to be unkind or un-trusting, I just went into debug mode and wrote all I thought about it. I guess I am so used to other environments (including my host, of whom I find despicable they have not even set a date for the upgrade of myphp) which would not consider this obvious at all 😉 I am very glad you do, because until it’s somehow fixed, I cannot go live on my blog with my forum. On facebook I have a page with about 270k people. The minute I announce the forum I am going to have so many ladies, all ready with their mobile phone and their 5-in-a-row emojis, clicking on the forum! 

I am hoping I may have found a solution to this but it will take a few days to code up. Might you be willing to act as a ‘beta’ tester…?