As of the beginning of August, two strange things began happening with emojis:

1) The emoji appears properly in the editor (visual AND text), but displays as “?” in the published post.

2) All previously-published emoji icons changed to a single style, independent of browser, OS, and device.

(Note: Robin Wilson’s “add visual editor” plugin has been enabled)

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WP 4.9.8 / BBPress2.5.14
https://www.fluentself.com/forums/
Problem exists with standard theme enabled
Forum is private, can’t publish login details here

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 6 years, 5 months ago]

WordPress comes with its own Emoji CSS. You can try disabling it with this plugin:

Disable Emojis (GDPR friendly)

It’s plausible that a theme or plugin change brought this back to life when it was previously disabled somewhere. Hard to say.

[@richardmiller-1 Participant 6 years, 5 months ago]

That seemed like such a likely culprit – but didn’t change a thing. Cleared caches, etc, but no effect at all. 🙁