After debating the inclusion of new smilies without an easy way of reverting them or opening up the decision to community feedback, the old smilies have found their way back into the core of WordPress thanks to Ryan Boren who performed the commit. While using a few text smilies himself, Ryan’s explanation of the change is quite humorous.
Back to the prehistoric smilies that everyone complains about but evidently likes better. :-) I was a fool for not appreciating the explosive topic that is smilies, my bad. It’s almost as close to people’s hearts as stats. :-)
Patches for filters and whatever else needed to make plugins easier appreciated.
I’m not completely sure if this change will progress over to WordPress.com but I would be highly surprised if it did’nt.
Speaking of WordPress development, don’t forget about the development chat. So how do you join the chat? Developer chats are held each Wednesday in the IRC channel (irc.freenode.com #wordpress-dev) at 9 PM UTC (5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific). However, there is talk that the time and day might change. For today’s meeting, it will be at the normally scheduled time.
The full set of smilies is finally back on wordpress.com. Yay. I just hope that the people who embraced the anaemic Tango smilies aren’t being deprived of their monkeys and angels now. ;)
Hopefully Automattic will learn from this that screwing around with people’s content is a Really Bad Idea. Just because you’re playing with the idea of changing something in core, it doesn’t always follow that the same changes are necessary or appropriate for wordpress.com.