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I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the charitab
by iamdave 8y ago
I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the charitable giving sector.
All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.
We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.
- jkaplowitz 8y agoThere are different levels of emoji support - and I totally agree that "not crashing when emoji enter your systems" is a vital one to have these days - as is preserving those emojis unmangled. For me the parent commenter's phrasing of "first class emoji support" goes rather beyond that, e.g. with friendly emoji pickers, maybe reaction emojis, custom emojis, different skin-tone emojis, etc. I'd view that bigger level of support as extremely optional for a transaction processing company like yours, though less so for a chat system intended for broad appeal in 2018.
- inimino 8y agoSounds more like "Unicode support" or even "input sanitization" was the missing feature there. As long as you have bytes in = bytes out and you don't crash on unexpected input, you never need to know that emoji even exist to avoid these problems.
- hobs 8y agoYep, and this sounds even more fishy because the idea that no unintended unicode characters wouldnt be copied and pasted into a form field is a joke.
- burgerdev 8y agoI would love to read the post-mortem on this one!