Using custom emoji with 'Enable Custom Emoji' set to 'false'

Hi all,
In our organization there is a Mattermost server wich was set up by my predecessor.
For some reason I’m unable to contact him to ask about configuration options. So I’ll ask you and will hope for an answer to come.
The questions is: How one may set custom emojis without setting ‘Enable Custom Emoji’ to ‘true’? It is set to ‘false’ but custom emojis are working.
It is really how the server works now.
Users are using number of custom emojis.
I have root ssh access to server and can see files containing custom emojis in ‘/client/emoji/’
But when I’m putting new emoji file to that folder, that new emoji doesn’t appears in client program.
Service restart doesn’t help.

How am I supposed to add more custom emojis without turning ‘Enable Custom Emoji’ on?

‘Enable Custom Emoji’ setting should be turned off for political reasons.

Hi, @dmytro.lysytsyn

By default, the custom emojis will not be rendered if the "EnableCustomEmoji": false is set in config.json. If there were any custom emojis that were used prior to the switch, it will automatically be rendered as plain text. In short, you are not able to create / use custom emojis when the feature is disabled.

To help us understand the behavior that you are seeing, can you please confirm this by providing the output of the following command:

cat /opt/mattermost/config/config.json | grep "CustomEmoji"

Additionally, can you please confirm that it is actually an emoji and not a GIF / image file by providing some screen shots? Thanks.

Hi ahmaddanial,

Thank you for your reply.
Here what we can see on our server:

user@server:~$ cat /opt/mattermost/config/config.json | grep "CustomEmoji"
    "EnableCustomEmoji": false,
    "RestrictCustomEmojiCreation": "all",

Hello, @dmytro.lysytsyn

That looks similar to mine. Can you please provide me with the confirmation that the post actually contains a custom emoji or rather a standard emoticon / GIF / image file?

Can you also run the following command to confirm if the emoji that you are seeing is actually a custom emoji?

SELECT * FROM Emoji WHERE Name = "<emoji_name>";