Emote variants

[FFY00]

We should have a concept of emote variants, meaning two different images are the same emote, and specific variants could be enabled on certain events (christmas, pride, etc).

Questions:

• Should the emote author be the one selecting the variant?
• Should other people able to mark their emotes as a variant of other emote?
  • Maybe yes, with original author selecting the default variant?
• Should we have support for user-specific variants?

[IZeeLikeEyeZee]

I think the way to go would be to have an option on an emote's page to create a variant (also an option on the normal emote uploading page ofc, maybe with suggestions based on alias), and a way to see the variants of a certain emote, or if an emote belongs to a group of variants.

We can let uploaders choose if their emote is a variant if another emote but have it be moderator-reviewed in case people don't use it how it's meant to be used. Also by "default variant" im guessing you mean which one shows up in search, in which case I think it should be the original, unless we (platform owners/admins, should keep the amount of people to a minimum) choose a cleaned-up, or better quality version. Artist attribution isn't really a concern here bc the artist will remain the same as the original author if it's just a cleaner version or smth like that. I brought up ideas about attribution/contributions in #17, but can expand on it more if you'd like @FFY00.

In search I think it would be best to hide variants by default, and have an option to include variants in your search so people don't necessarily have to go to an emote's page to search its variants.

As for events I think we manage those through tags/variants, and have an easy system to switch your emotes by either automatically switching using moderator-recommended variants, or manually using a system (can use 7tv's migration tool as inspiration) where you are shown the event variants of an emote, and can choose from them. Can even possibly add a polling feature so people can choose it based on votes from chat. Luckily we won't have to worry about this until the fall or so.