Emoticons work sometimes, sometimes not

  • Resolved supervinnie40

    (@supervinnie40)


    4 years, 9 months ago

    About 2 years ago I mentioned to Yoast how emoticons don’t work in the Meta Description when entered either in de plugin menu, or in the snipper on a blog/page/category etc.
    If you entered an emoticon, and saved the page, your text just wouldn’t be saved.

    The only solution was to dive into the database and manually edit the data there (which is not recommended).
    Since then, Yoast never bothered to do much about this. It works on most pages, and a few posts (not sure why it doesn’t just always work) and there is zero documentation about this from Yoast.
    However, if you try to use the “Taxonomy” tab in the plugin itself (which is very handy if you wanna standardize the description on pages, posts, categories etc), the emoticons don’t work anymore.

    Enter emoticons as icon, as HTML entities, or hexadecimal entities or whatever. It just doesn’t work.

    So, somehow they managed to make something work (kinda-ish) on a few pages (but not all), and totally make it NOT work on other pages. Why?
    Why not simply support it, and/or add a bit of documentation about what works and what doesn’t.

    For the record, I tried the test with standard emoticons (smiley face) and some more rare emoticons (parcel box). No difference.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Hi @supervinnie40,

    Thank you for reaching out.

    Adding emoji’s to either the defaults under SEO > Search Appearance or in the metabox for a specific post or page, should be working.

    We just tested this in a local environment and they are saved and outputted. However, in order for emoji’s to work on your site, your database collation should be able to understand and write them correctly in your database. If you are not sure how to check this, please contact your web host. If they are working in some places but not everywhere, we can only guess that the collation on some of your database tables are not optimized to save them correctly.

    Thread Starter supervinnie40

    (@supervinnie40)

    Right, seeing as I can’t add screenshots I’ll try to explain it.

    I go to: [my domain]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#top#taxonomies

    Next I fold open the top one “Category”.
    In the description field I see the text I entered a while ago:
    Bestel voor 17.00u, volgende werkdag binnen! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending. 7-daagse klantenservice.

    In the description field I enter the following:
    Bestel voor 17.00u &#x23F0 ;, volgende werkdag binnen &#x2714 ;! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending &#x1F4EE ;. 7-daagse klantenservice.
    ***I added a space in front of ; to prevent the code changing into emoticons ***

    Which should look like:
    Bestel voor 17.00u ?, volgende werkdag binnen ?! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending ??. 7-daagse klantenservice.

    I then click on “Save changes”, the page reloads and my emoticons the Meta Description field now shows the text including the emoticons.

    BUT…

    I then take the next field and fold open Post-Tag. The description shows the same text:
    Bestel voor 17.00u, volgende werkdag binnen! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending. 7-daagse klantenservice.

    So I first copy/paste the emoticon-filled text from Categories (which I just changed) and click Save Changes. The page reloads, and guess what: it didn’t save anything. It still shows the same text that was here before.
    So, attempt 2: I copy/paste the text with the &# codes in it (not the visual emoticon, but the HTML entity).
    Again, I click Save Changes and whatch the page reload. But… nothing saved. The description in Post-Tag still says:
    Bestel voor 17.00u, volgende werkdag binnen! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending. 7-daagse klantenservice.
    (without the emoticon)

    So I checked wether it would save anything at all. I change the text in a few random words without any emoticons. Click Save Changes, and behold… my changes are saved and my random text shows up in the description.

    So…. I add a simple emoticon: &#x263A ; which is just a smiley face: “?”. Saved the changes again and watch the page reload. Result: nothing. The smiley is gone and my random text is still there.

    I tried the same with several other fields, and even tried to change it in the tab “post types”. But same results. So there are a few places where it works, but many, many others where it doesn’t work.

    If I open a page, or post and I do the same thing it doesn’t work. Both the &# code won’t work, but the actual emoticon itself also doesn’t work.
    BUT… If I enter the smiley-filled text in the Excerpt, and then enter %%excerpt%% in the snipper, it does work (Even though %%excerpt%% isn’t shown in the useable snippets for some weird reason [facepalm]).

    So, like I said before, it works sometimes but more often it doesn’t.
    If this was a problem with my database or my host, it wouldn’t work anywhere, not sometimes yes and sometimes no.
    Ooh, and smileys in any other text-field works great. You plugin is the only one I have that still (after many years) isn’t capable of actually processing these common things properly.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by supervinnie40.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by supervinnie40. Reason: added space to prevent code changing into emoticons

    Hi @supervinnie40,

    Thank you for your thorough explanation. We are happy to try to replicate the same issue, but we can’t. We went to our local installation on the same settings (Taxonomies > Category) and copy/pasted:

    Bestel voor 17.00u ?, volgende werkdag binnen ?! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending ??. 7-daagse klantenservice.

    into the meta description field.

    When we save this, all of the content, including the emoji’s remains in the field. Having said this, this is only appearing on your site and that’s why we still believe that this is related to what we explained earlier. Your WordPress database consists of multiple tables and these options you are configuring should end up in the prefix_options table. We think that the collation on this table differs from your prefix_posts table where you configure emoji’s in the posts themselves. That can be the reason why it sometimes works and sometimes it does not, depending in which table the content should go.

    Can you please share a screenshot of your database tables and their collations and othe settings using a screenshot sharing service such as Pasteboard, please try to not include any database name or user settings in the screenshot.

    We look forward to your reply.

    Thread Starter supervinnie40

    (@supervinnie40)

    Hi,

    You’ll have to explain to me what type of info you mean with “collation”. With your previous reply I just forwarded it to my host who replied that this should all be fine with a little explanation. I know where to find most things, but don’t always know their technical terms.
    I did find this piece: https://pasteboard.co/Ja9r5vD.png
    However, I have not been able to verify if the database I am using is set up the same way. I am using PhpAdmin if that matters.

    Regarding the SQL table, I thought i’d be easier to stick to the field from my explanation: the Post-Tag meta description field. In the screenshot is the contents of the table:

    https://pasteboard.co/Ja9l3pf.png

    Funnily enough you can see the content from the other field just above it. You can even see the HTML entity codes for the emoticons that where saved.
    Btw, this was the only entry in my database that matched the text from the field in the SEO plugin, see other screenshot: https://pasteboard.co/Ja9mP4x.png and https://pasteboard.co/Ja9oJ6X.png

    Purely to test some further I copy/pasted the part that does show the HTML entity emoticons, into the place where the Yoast plugin doesn’t seem capable of saving them.
    Basically entering the wanted content manually into the database instead of using the WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately there seems to be a delay of some sort, because I can see that the database saved it correctly, but the dashboard doesn’t show it in the Yoast plugin.

    Thread Starter supervinnie40

    (@supervinnie40)

    Update, the dashboard finally showed the manual edit I did in this field. Basically, I changed

    s:21:”metadesc-tax-category”;
    s:131:”Bestel voor 17.00u ⏰, volgende werkdag binnen ✔! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending 📮. 7-daagse klantenservice.”;
    s:28:”display-metabox-tax-category”;b:1;
    s:20:”noindex-tax-category”;b:0;
    s:18:”title-tax-post_tag”;
    s:48:”%%term_title%% tag %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%”;
    s:21:”metadesc-tax-post_tag”;
    s:133:”Welkom bij de detail-fanaten. Bestel voor 17.00u, volgende werkdag binnen! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending. 7-daagse klantenservice.”;

    into:

    s:21:”metadesc-tax-category”;
    s:131:”Bestel voor 17.00u ⏰, volgende werkdag binnen ✔! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending 📮. 7-daagse klantenservice.”;
    s:28:”display-metabox-tax-category”;b:1;
    s:20:”noindex-tax-category”;b:0;
    s:18:”title-tax-post_tag”;
    s:48:”%%term_title%% tag %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%”;
    s:21:”metadesc-tax-post_tag”;
    s:133:”Welkom bij de detail-fanaten. Bestel voor 17.00u ⏰, volgende werkdag binnen ✔! Vanaf € 50,- gratis verzending 📮. 7-daagse klantenservice.”;

    But when I reloaded the dashboard a few times, every single “description” in the Yoast plugin was empty. So something went wrong in a major way. I undid the change and everything was normal again.

    Hi @supervinnie40,

    We’re sorry to hear that there hasn’t been a solution to the problem on your website yet.

    This issue has been solved in the past by making sure that the database and the tables are using utf8mb4 as mentioned in this closed issue: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13409.

    We recommend contacting your hosting provider for further assistance if you’re not familiar with how to change your database settings since this could break your site.

    Thread Starter supervinnie40

    (@supervinnie40)

    Hi Priscilla,

    I’m not suprised to be honest. I’ve found that the Yoast service desk can’t do much more then give advice. After sending in a few complaints and tips, I’ve never gotten the reply “yes, we can build that” or “Our developers will fix that problem”.

    Nonetheless, do you understand that you are giving me the advice to change the database settings, even though some fields in the same table work, and other fields don’t? If the setting was the problem, the emoticons wouldn’t work in any field within the same table. But in this case, we are talking about 2 cells, in the same table, one holds the correct value and the other doesn’t.
    That is not a database problem. That is a Yoast plugin problem. And to be fair, it’s one I’ve reported with you 2 years ago.

    Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    @supervinnie40 We’re sorry you feel that, but we can assure you then when a bug is submitted to our developers we investigate it and as long as it can be replicated we do work to resolve it. If you wish to submit a bug report you can do so at https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/new

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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