If I type, for example, 
I get an emoji. It’s not obvious to me, short of doing :-), how to suppress it. Please can this behaviour be turned off? I meant what I typed.
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It doesn’t look like the discourse devs even understand the problem you’re describing lol
Alright, this is a sitewide setting but it is granular enough that I decided to try changing it given the ascii heritage of dcss. What I did specifically is disable the parsing of something like :-) as an emoji, which does not disable :slight_smile: as or even disable the autocomplete popup when typing an ascii emoji. But you can now close out the popup with esc or just keep typing and :-) will not be converted.
Because it’s sitewide, if enough people are bothered by this I may change it back though. Feel free to post in the linked discourse meta FR thread which is asking for this to be per-user. (Though I think that thread is a bit confused because seems to combine two distinct FRs; the original one was asking for the popup to be disabled, not to disable ascii emoji autoconversion.)
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Thanks Advil 
:)