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          LittleBITS: Notes from Ukraine, TidBITS Talk Emoji Responses

   Adam Engst

   I recently exchanged email with a friend of TidBITS in Ukraine and
   couldn't resist sharing her response here, along with an explanation of
   how you can now respond to TidBITS Talk posts with emoji, much like
   Apple's Tapback feature in Messages.

Notes from Ukraine

   I recently received email from Irene Stepanovska, who I've known for
   many years in her PR role for BeLight Software, telling us about the
   release of Art Text 4.2. After passing the news on to Agen Schmitz so
   he could write it up for the Watchlist (see '[1]Art Text 4.2,' 15
   December 2022), I asked Irene how she and others at BeLight were
   holding up. It may seem like business as usual from the outside, but I
   had to share her description of what life is like for her and her
   fellow Ukrainians:

     A large part of our team remains in Odesa. We are holding up,
     developing our apps, and supporting our country, armed forces, and
     our people. Just like any other city or small town in Ukraine, every
     day we experience the consequences of the cruel and inhuman Russian
     war against our country and civilians. There have been power outages
     for several weeks. Now most of Odesa's population has electricity
     twice a day for 3'4 hours. Sometimes, after massive attacks, people
     don't have electric power for several days, and some don't even have
     central heating and water. This is a complete nightmare for those
     who don't have gas in their houses and use electric stoves and ovens
     to cook food. We are thankful to the technicians who are working
     24/7 fixing everything as quickly as possible in spite of massive
     damage. We fully understand this is the price for our freedom and
     future victory.

   As a coda to Irene's email, I recently ran across this article from the
   Los Angeles Times about [2]how Amazon has helped the Ukrainian
   government move essential data into the cloud, which, as Liam Maxwell
   of Amazon noted, can't be taken out with a cruise missile. That's an
   aspect of cloud security I suspect most of us have never considered.

New Reactions Emoji for TidBITS Talk Posts

   In '[3]Messages Becomes More Flexible and Forgiving of Mistakes' (27
   October 2022), I mentioned that I've become fond of Apple's Tapback
   feature in Messages, which lets you send emoji-like responses to
   messages as quick, non-textual acknowledgments. To simulate that sort
   of quick response in TidBITS Talk, where it's annoying to have someone
   ask a question and then thank everyone with a separate short post, I
   long ago installed the third-party Retort plug-in into Discourse. With
   it, users could react to posts with any emoji they wanted instead of
   just the default 'like' feature behind the heart icon. We saw a lot of
   ð and ð, along with a few other emoji.

   So when longtime TidBITS Talk reader [4]Jolin Warren pointed out
   recently that the Retort plug-in had been deprecated in favor of the
   official Reactions plug-in, I made the switch. You can still click the
   heart icon under a post, but if you hover over the heart icon briefly,
   you can instead choose from a custom set of other emoji. After
   discussion with involved members of the TidBITS Talk community, I've
   settled on the following options, with an explanation of what I think
   each one means.
     * '¤ï¸ is the default, and I see it as a simple way to say, 'Good
       post!'
     * ð may seem quite similar to '¤ï¸, but I intend it to mean something
       more specific: 'I agree with what you said in this post.'
     * ð¯ is intended to be the superlative of '¤ï¸, in the sense of 'This
       post is both entirely correct and utterly helpful!'
     * ð means 'Thank you!' and is a quick way to show appreciation for
       assistance.
     * ð lets you mark a post as being amusing. 'Nuff said.
     * is a custom emoji we added called 'apple-six-colors.' Use it to
       express, 'Yay, Apple!' or 'Steve Jobs would have loved this.'
     * ' exists so you have a way to note that you found a post confusing.
     * ð lets you indicate that you disagree with a post without going
       into details.

   You'll note that the first four provide different shades of being
   thankful, appreciative, or supportive. That's intentional because
   TidBITS Talk is that sort of community, but don't read too much into
   the nuance. It's there for those who, like me, would be linguistically
   uncomfortable with jamming all those meanings into a single '¤ï¸.

   The ' and ð sit elsewhere on the spectrum, providing a quick way to
   indicate that you don't understand what someone is saying or show that
   you disagree with their post. I hope that they won't be needed much and
   that those whose posts receive them will read them as constructive
   criticism. Give these response emoji a try and see how they feel.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/watchlist/art-text-4-2/
   2. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data
   3. https://tidbits.com/2022/10/27/messages-becomes-more-flexible-and-forgiving-of-mistakes/
   4. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/use-reactions-plugin-to-support-emoji-responses/20675?u=ace

   Hidden links:
   5. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2022/12/six-color-apple.png

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