Emojis replaced by question marks

Anyone?

Have you tried basic troubleshooting steps like disabling all plugins and using a default WordPress theme and then slowly enabling them one by one and testing? Perhaps something on your site (plugin or theme) is somehow interfering with the default WordPress emoji functionality.

Yes. The problem isn’t just on the post itself. On my text editor, the emojis are replaced by question marks. If they were fine on the editor and not showing up on the post, then I’d have thought of a plugin incompatibility. But that’s not what’s happening. It seems like WordPress isn’t handling emojis properly.

What theme are you using? Some themes have plugin-like functionality and this could be causing the emojis to not display in the editor or in the actual post.

I deactivated every single plugin and activated Twenty Forteen. The problem still persisted. So I really don’t think it’s theme/plugin related…

Okay so we’ve definitely ruled out the theme and plugin variables. So next questions – what version of MySQL database are you running? Also What collation type is being used on the database? Perhaps something is misconfigured or perhaps the version of MySQL is too old to support the Unicode encoding necessary for emoji characters.

MySQL Version: 10.0.24-MariaDB
No clue about collation type? Where can I find it?

But then again, I have another WP install in the same domain (the one with the error is under myurl.com/site, and this other one is myurl.com/teste). Both have the same theme and mostly the same plugins installed – and emojis work just fine on “teste”. Would there still be any difference in the databases, if they’re both on the same server?

Potentially – there could be differences if both sites used different database instances that were configured differently even though both sites were run off the same physical or virtual server.

At this point you may want to reach out to your hosting provider for further support as this issue may have more to do with the server (and its applications) configuration rather than with WordPress directly.

Will do. Thank you for your assistance!

No luck reaching our host.
If it helps, I also can’t display Japanese/Chinese characters. The same thing happens: it works fine when I type/paste them, but after I save the post, they all become question marks.

Can you backup your site and install it on a local testing server for further testing?

And it’s particularly troubling that you can’t reach your host. You may want to start developing a disaster recovery plan for this site if you haven’t already.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. They did get back to me, but they said the problem wasn’t on their end so there was nothing they could do to fix it.

And to be honest, I don’t even know how I’d go about installing it on a local server. =~