Microsoft sent out a new update for Skype today which comes with performance improvements and a few bug fixes. One of the main things that was fixed in this update was blocked contacts showing up in the top contacts panel under Skype home – there was no way of removing or deleting them. The second fix dealt with a missing field in the login window. There were also reports of Skype crashing when the chat name contained special characters, which has since been fixed.
But there’s still no news on restoring the emoticons which were removed couple of versions back. If you didn’t know, Microsoft removed a few emoticons in the 6.14 update. According to Skype, the offensive emoticons – (finger), (wtf), (fubar) – were cleaned up. “These hidden emoticons indeed got removed with 6.14 because of them or their shortcodes having the potential to offend some users,” a community manager on the Skype forums mentioned. Along with those three, (hollest) emoticon is removed as well. It was an Easter egg dedication to former Skype CEO ‘Stella Hollest’. The emoticon, if you never saw it, wasn’t actually offensive, just a woman with high heels walking around in a skirt.
Apparently, the Skype community wasn’t happy about this. A thread, suggested by the same community manager, was started and people have been posting their pleas to get those emoticons back but to no avail. Skype was updated twice after those emoticons were taken out but there’s still no sign of them.
What is your say on this? Do you miss those “offensive” emoticons? Or are you actually glad that they’ve been removed?
