I often like to use pure text and symbols over emojis. So, :) rather than 
but the former is automatically coverted to the latter. I’ve tried \:) but that still gets me the emoji.
I read this can be changed from admin side, can we have this changed?
Its a site-wide setting unfortunately, disabling would turn off everyone auto convert emoji. This feature was requested at Discourse but had low votes:
Yeah, I think there might even be some kind of hidden emojis working through text replacement strings. That’s why things like keep getting converted automatically. It would be nice if the admin side could adjust this so we can choose pure text when we want.
Haha its draw now, in the voting results