1777648 - Automatic emoji conversion occurs in username strings

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 954572

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, defect)

Description

[sopwerdna]

Attachment: Image of unexpected behavior

Steps to reproduce:

Join any matrix room with the chat functionality (I encountered this in #matrix:matrix.org). Let some other user join with a homeserver starting with 's' (so that the username string ends up as @user:something.com).

Actual results:

The characters :s in the other user's join message are interpreted and replaced with the emoji U+1F615 (confused face) and so the displayed username is unreadable. I am attaching an example of the behavior with a test user from the above public chat room (user was @admin:synapse-performance-test.lab.element.dev).

Expected results:

Automatic emoji conversion should probably be skipped for usernames/room join/leave messages, and system messages in general.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

this didn't exist in version 91?

Comment 2

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

This is a duplicate of bug 954572.

Comment 3

[sopwerdna]

Hi Patrick,
I would argue this is definitely not a duplicate. Reading #954572, the issue is that the regex for automatic emoji conversions is a bit too enthusiastic and should be tuned to avoid word boundaries. This bug report is that automatic emoji conversion is occurring in system messages (i.e. join/leave messages, usernames, and server addresses) which should always be presented verbatim by Thunderbird and not modified. I would propose reopening this and investigating why these emoji conversions are happening in these sorts of places in the UI. I can try to track this down if someone can point me roughly to the right part of the codebase (although I'm not at all familiar with Thunderbird's codebase, I would like to try to assist).
Thanks!

RE: the previous question by Wayne Mery, I haven't had a chance to check, but I didn't think 91 had matrix support at all?

Comment 4

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Sorry for the delay on responding.

(In reply to sopwerdna from comment #3)

I would argue this is definitely not a duplicate. Reading #954572, the issue is that the regex for automatic emoji conversions is a bit too enthusiastic and should be tuned to avoid word boundaries.

I think fixing bug 954572 would fix this as well.

This bug report is that automatic emoji conversion is occurring in system messages (i.e. join/leave messages, usernames, and server addresses) which should always be presented verbatim by Thunderbird and not modified.

I don't agree with this -- I don't see system messages as special that they might not have emoji in them. (E.g. a part message or subject could easily have plaintext emojis in them.)

It occurring in usernames does seem a bit different, and maybe not covered by bug 954572. We might be able to do something similar to bug 953653 to fix this case.

I would propose reopening this and investigating why these emoji conversions are happening in these sorts of places in the UI. I can try to track this down if someone can point me roughly to the right part of the codebase (although I'm not at all familiar with Thunderbird's codebase, I would like to try to assist).

The issue is the same root cause as bug 954572 -- the regex for finding text emoji is overly greedy.

RE: the previous question by Wayne Mery, I haven't had a chance to check, but I didn't think 91 had matrix support at all?

This isn't specific to Matrix, other protocols would exhibit the same behavior, e.g. an IRC usernames of foo^^ would match.

I do somewhat wonder if we even need to do plaintext emoji identification in incoming messages anymore now that everything has settled on Unicode, which includes fairly rich emoji in it.