Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J” | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is fixing the Outlook bug that causes “:)” to revert to “J”

businessinsider.com

45 pointsarishi23 comments

That's what that was!? I aways wondered why some people would end their emails to me with "J". At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was just some encoding issue. Never knew I was missing out on smiles.

I always assumed there was some piece of Internet wisdom I didn't that the "J" represented.

Me too. I interpreted it as a smile, but just assumed it was some meme I didn't know about (and couldn't be bothered to look up).

At least I never replied to anyone with an explicit J, as in "Thank you J"

I'm called James so when I got a "Thanks J", I thought they had taken it on themselves to give me a new nickname. Perhaps signing off my emails with "Thanks :)" gave them sane impression.

Strangely felt better when I realised it was a smiley face.

Me too! Plus everybody calls me "J" or "JJ" because those are my initials and it is universally known that I dislike my name.

That explains a lot of things (my name also begins with J)

People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue. Microsoft wanted to represent a real smiley in text without resorting to images. There was no standard unicode character for such a smiley so Microsoft chose a font that did support the smiley character.

Of course hindsight is 20-20, it's easy to say now they should've gone with a character that wasn't in use yet, but circumstances being what they were, a bug is not a completely correct description for what this behavior is.

How about you just leave it alone and let :) render as :) ? Microsoft and Outlook have a long history with lacking interoperability. Outlook Rich Text format. Outlook Rich Text handling of attachments. Lack of read/write CalDav and CardDav support. Outlook support for IMAP is meh.

> People call this a bug, I call it an interoperability issue

Furthermore, it's just a configuration issue. You can change it (it's in the autocorrection settings).

Can you change it as the receiver who sees the J?

It's not really a bug, it's total disregard for people not using your software. Only a monopolist company can afford to behave like that.

And by the way this is especially messed up if you use a screen reader.

6 years of this bug, and now they're fixing.

Microsoft is run by salesmen. Code that yields bullet points on a box takes priority. Code that just smoothes things out for the user is considered a pointless threat to the bottom line and is therefore deferred indefinitely.

Microsoft Outlook on the Mac (specifically meeting invites) has borked bullet lists repeatedly for me.

Of course, in this case, it's "not Windows" so it must suck worse than the Windows version.

Funny thing is that Excel came out for the Mac first in 1985, and was so popular that they made a version for Windows 2 years later.

That's because it's only a bug if you're not using Microsoft software.

Wondering what could've been fixed instead.. 6 years ago emoji symbols weren't as predominant as today, I guess it's more of a marketing bug-fix, indeed.

It took a while for emoji to show up in Unicode, then for Windows to support emoji, and probably some time for Office to settle on an emoji strategy.

I wish they would fix thread locks when syncing exchange accounts with slow internet. Been able to reproduce it super easily and recorded it on video but no output in system logs.

Triage report: "Non-critical (P25). No need to worry as this only affects a really small minority of our users. In our user surveys, we found out that too few people are actually happy when they are inside Microsoft Outlook."

You know what bug/feature I would dearly like fixed? When I hover over a from or reply-all address that is rendering as a display name, e.g. "John Smith", I would like for Outlook to show what the raw email address is in the card that comes up, without having to expand it out into the ginormous full contact card.

Raymond Chen commented on this, back in 2006: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=...

Would be interested to hear a public PIR on what excuse they make up for this taking them 6+ years to fix on such a widespread bug.

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