Disabling Emoticons Server-wide in Confluence 5.4

Question

We are law firm and frequent references to statutes or regulations will bring up emoticons.  We do NOT want to make users change this option in their Settings. We need this turned off across-the-board, but I do not see this documented past versions 4.x.

Can someone enlighten me?

With gratitude,

Gail

Chii · Answer

It's possible to disable auto-insertion of emoticons via the editor by disabling the autoformat in the editor preferences. Go to https://your_confluence/users/viewmyeditorsettings.action and check the 'disable autoformatting' option.

This will also disable other auto formatting, such as bullet points and h1 etc. You will have to manually select the text, and use the toolbar to format your document.

Philipp Sendek _catworkx_ · Answer

Hey Gail,

checking again myself I can confirm that the documentation that seems to provide info on how to turn it off, is either outdated or removed altogether. 
My - quite hacky - approach would probably be to browse through the Confluence database and look for the profile-setting that you've mentioned. Afterwards I would create a script to disable it for all users, creating a trigger to do this regularly.
I also read in the following comment https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/48140, that it could be modified within wiki-renderer-components.xml but this might also only apply to older version.

However, I hope someone else comes up with a proper way.

Regards,
Philipp