The shrug kaomoji is almost a staple for any discussion. It can lighten the tone of an otherwise serious discussion or add a little more humor to an already funny one. There is no reason to say shrug should not be used here on the DevForum. However, normal formatting breaks the kaomoji:
¯_(ツ)_/¯
It removes the first forearm. In order to make my shrug correct, I had to play with formatting and do this:
¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Most users do not know how to do this and the normal version just looks odd. Therefore, I would like to make this very small proposal to autocorrect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to ¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯, or to ignore formatting on the traditional kaomoji.
I find no legitimate reason that this should not be a feature:
It is simple to implement — basically just a JS replace() type feature.
Similar structures exist already — typing :) autocorrects to (which also shows that emoji support exists here) and quoting an entire post causes automatic removal of the quote.
The shrug has been used 32 times in 3 months, excluding doubtless hundreds of DMs:
Existence (or lack of one in this case) of a feature on similar platforms ~= feature must exist on this one.
Is there a more common or similarly common kaomoji or similar icon that is also broken by text formatting? My point is that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a common kaomoji in discussions (unlike ASCII art, which would almost certainly be flagged as spam in most cases) and such a simple problem should not be overlooked because it’s “typical” or “tradition”.
don’t like the new title but I can’t put any reasoning in the post now since it was locked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Title was force changed and I disagree with the fundamentals behind it. My intention was simply to fix the shrug kaomoji. Clearly this is against the wishes of the admins. Just wanted to make it clear that I do not agree with fixing any other ASCII art either, just the very popular “shrug”
It’s not a bug but a lack of a feature. There are many more examples of ASCII art being broken and as others said, it’s better to get used to it. There’s already a feature for this and it’s called preformated text.
We don’t have plans to improve ASCII art/emoji support on this forum, it is a conscious decision to only handle Markdown input, and that clashes with certain symbols that ASCII art would need to render properly. I recommend using the workaround mentioned earlier in the topic.
Changed the topic title so that this answer can be re-linked for similar questions/concerns related to non-Markdown input.