When using a downloaded emoticon set, and if the user name is the same of the nickname, when a message has an emoticon, it gets highlighted. This is because emoticons are in /home/<user>/.kde/share/emoticons and the path is in the html of the message when the highlight plugin runs.
This is basically an effect of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299292
Note that the order of plugin loading seems to be random, because sometimes I see this, other times I don't
Git commit de9615d32e02057496db258c083bc2d031d7f7b6 by David Edmundson. Committed on 10/03/2013 at 23:35. Pushed by davidedmundson into branch 'master'. Set a low weight on the highlight plugin This will cause the highlight plugin to run early before any other filters M +1 -0 filters/highlight/ktptextui_message_filter_highlight.desktop.cmake http://commits.kde.org/telepathy-text-ui/de9615d32e02057496db258c083bc2d031d7f7b6