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Comment by eskibars | Hacker News Reader

I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it.

Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well.

I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out.

Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead

View on HN

Trying this emoji thing out inline. Had not even heard of the auto-symbol translation

As a test, looked for (star).com [might show up with .com, or %E2%98%85.com ?](EDIT: nope) Long form is: https://www.xn--p3h.com/ Source was a question on StackExchange about weird domain names.[1] Seemed to be related to the authors hunt for "prestige" emojis.

Apparently owned by Gregg N. Ostrick of GNO, Inc. bought wayyy back in 2001-04-19. [2] If this is such a new idea, how did Mr. Ostrick buy (star).com back in 2001? Got some hijinks with time traveling retcon sales of emoji names?

Notably, typing the (star) symbol in the browser (Firefox) does seem to work, and gets auto-extended to xn--p3h. Others, like (star)(star)(star) appear to work (xn--p3haa) just have no domain squatter. Others, like crazy bail bonds names, or eBay reviews, such as A(star)++ appear to resolve (https://www.xn--a++-0m5a.com/). However, I'm not sure if those actually work.

Also, confusing stuff. Like Wingdings (star), which turns into unicode << do Not actually go to the what Appear to be visually the same. (https://www.xn--iba.com/) Well beyond G00GLE.com (zerO)(zer0) issues.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1719132/how-do-i-registe...

[2] https://www.whois.com/whois/%E2%98%85.com

According to the IETF standard for IDNA it is invalid.

https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-ad...

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-emojis-domai...

gTLDs have to follow that, ccTLDs not necessarily (is what I got from comments on the original discussion of this blog post.)

Even if emoji was invalid, unicode in general is valid in domain names, and should be converted to punycode. Local domains exist too.

It’s not the email client’s job to decide whether a domain is valid, it’s DNS’.

HN's emoji stripper is intentional. some are supported, eg; ↖↙↗↘

but others are not, so we're reduced to using things like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to communicate

I don't feel like emoji add anything substantial to a textual conversation, it's mostly useless fluff. I don't miss it on HN, so I disagree with your use of "reduced" here. :)

> I don't feel like emoji add anything substantial to a textual conversation

Proceeds to add an ascii emoji <facepalm>

Am I the only person who still calls "ASCII emoji" "emoticons"?

No, you're not. :) Emoticons aren't emoji.

What would an emoji provide over that ascii combo?

Variety and reduced ambiguity.

Immediate understanding from across the room without needing to read a paragraph

Nuance

The opposite of nuance because the image renders differently for different browsers/platforms so you can only assume a very vague meaning.

I agree on the assuming and the vagueness. Kids these days feel that the thumbs up emoji is like a passive aggressive middle finger, same with a green checkbox -- and they are apparently bothered by the ellipsis too while we are at it -- not understanding that it is totally valid punctuation and what it can represent. The fact that these individuals are absolutely wrong comes from the pictograms being vague.

you're entitled to your own opinion, but text lacks tone, and emoji helps bring some of it back so I don't see it as useless fluff

I see what you did there :LOL:

       _           _                         __ _       _      _
      (_)_   _ ___| |_    _   _ ___  ___    / _(_) __ _| | ___| |_
      | | | | / __| __|  | | | / __|/ _ \  | |_| |/ _` | |/ _ \ __|
      | | |_| \__ \ |_   | |_| \__ \  __/  |  _| | (_| | |  __/ |_
     _/ |\__,_|___/\__|   \__,_|___/\___|  |_| |_|\__, |_|\___|\__|
    |__/                                          |___/

https://repology.org/project/figlet/versions

Pretty sure it's because Emojis are Unicode and HN only supports ASCII.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524948

你确定马？

I love that I didn't have to translate this to know what it said

I don't know how you got that idea but it's completely wrong.

HN allows 99% of Unicode.

Well how would they filter out emojis? My assumption is, that they're doing it by exluding Unicode code points for all emojis.

> My assumption is, that they're doing it by exluding Unicode code points for all emojis.

Yes? The code points of emojis are excluded by HN.

Try it yourself with characters of different types! Ones that are neither ASCII (including builtin html entities, sure) nor emoji.

I was playing around with this about a decade ago and discovered one of the dark patterns of the interwebs -- the emoji domain name would first show as 'available' and if I didn't immediately pounce on it I'd go back and it would show up as 'available for auction' or some bullshit.

Pretty sure I ended up buying a turtle and did absolutely nothing with it. Almost had the hammer and sickle for some quality trolling...

--edit--

This just reminded me of reading about Milka (the euro brand) taking away the domain name of a woman named Milka and, being drunk at the time, immediately buying milka.eu.com (or something very similar) and just setting up a webpage with a picture of a statue of Stalin I'd taken while in Hungary. Not too sure why they didn't go after my obvious trademark infringement?

-- edit II because I'd mixed Stella with Milka, my bad Stella.

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