#4151·YOURLS

Next release : better emoji support out of the box

Author: ozhCreated Aug 23, 2026Updated Aug 23, 2026

Some foundations are right, like storing everything as utf8mb4 in the DB. Yet, I have the feeling we could be more liberal with the emojis and funky chars, with the following goals :

  • out of the box, accept any custom keyword (ozh, O-Z-H, ozh♥️, etc, with most likely some chars still reserved such as ;#{} and a few more)
  • this should work flawlessly on stat pages, editing keyword, etc
  • continue to generate random keywords against an ASCII set [a-z0-9] (uppercase?)
  • eventually maybe deprecated YOURLS_URL_CONVERT because frankly picking 36 or 62 hasn't be very user friendly