I’m sure we can take care of you all year if you bring it back. Gucci will help me out there.
Raised hand emjoi!! I will send along some beer money too.
If you make any progress at all where you think someone can pick it up, I too wanted to try and get a local dev env set up and tinker with creating a plugin. I’m happy to collaborate. My problem is that I’m not sure where I would start but I guess I need to take that first step.
I’ve got your branch running in my dev server, I’m just seeing whatever error comes up, googling it, bodge-fixing it, then moving on to the next…
I appreciate both of y’all’s efforts. I’m obviously being jokingly over-the-top about the emoji reactions, but I do like what they bring to the experience here. If there’s a way to get them back and I can help by paying a little in cash or beers, I’m more than happy to.
After poking around today, it feels like the best course of action here would be to contribute the ability to pick from all emojis to the official discourse-reactions plugin.
Retort’s codebase is… very… well, hard to decipher, and the official plugin has the benefit of more love and care. The features it enables are already 80% of the way there, it just needs a way to let admins specify “any emoji” rather than an allowlist, and the interface to render the picker. I’m pretty sure even with 0 Discourse dev background I can manage that. Does that sound sufficient?
There’s a question of whether they’ll merge the change, but I believe you could always use the fork in the meantime.
Edit: ok, I see, the current discourse-reactions plugin only allows 1 reaction per user. That could be an issue. Also their forum thread discussing that limitation is such a … nevermind.
Apparently the core team has these features on their roadmap as of 2024 but it’s “very complicated”
I’m suspicious of that but don’t want to be overconfident here. I’d also hate to sink a few evenings into this only for them to reject the contribution because their team was already working on something.
Seeing what appears to be such a straightforward tweak stalled for 2+ years over longwinded bikeshedding discussions and then called so hard they’d need a third party sponsor… I don’t know whether to be afraid, or question my own understanding of my industry lol. Tempted to drop everything and start a whitelabel forum platform competitor startup and see how hard this really is.
(final? edit): I see. Just looking around the product, this is likely a case of the team being completely busy on the stuff that makes money and neglecting the fun bits. So they may be open to user contributions here.
Wow, this Hifihedgehog person is willing to spend thousands to do this but that was a year ago.
Thanks for taking a look. Maybe one day we’ll get it back!
Yeah, it’s weird, it really looks like someone was paying a whole agency to do this a year ago and it never materialized.
My conclusion after fiddling around is they sort of painted themselves into a corner with their design choices and made Retort-style reactions kind of hard to enable. But if the team still plans to support them in the official plugin, then there’s a chance any effort I put in will only be worth a short time before they supersede it. Unfortunately I don’t know Ruby which really limits my effectiveness here.
Classic software product management headaches. I get enough of this in my day job, lol.
In other announcement news, that blog that I still run turns 18 today!
https://dtraleigh.com/2025/01/18-years-of-ralconigraphy-the-study-and-love-of-downtown-raleigh/
The site’s finally old enough to vote! Congrats!
But no beer for you! HAHAHA
Wait you have a blog?!
FYI, your donate link just goes to a picture (https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif)
Haha, thanks for the heads up.
JUST IN: Punxsutawney Phil woke up on Sunday and saw his shadow, meaning we are destined for six more weeks of winter, according to legend.
Funny, I saw my resident ground hog, Chonks, nibbling away happily in the front yard. I think winter will be short in Alabama!
Well, that Canadian cold will be tariffed.
Funny not funny John.
It’s our current reality.
You named him after a children’s hospital?