Please provide an option, at least at user level and preferably even globally by the admin, to disable automatic conversion of characters to emoticons.

A character like ":" is all but uncommon to use in text and every time one has to act to prevent it from being converted to a smiley.

There's too much risk that emoticons are being added by accident now.

The justification that "the majority of customers want Emoticons" is almost ridiculous if you want to consider Confluence to be a professional product used for professional purposes.

There is a demand as already shown by CONFCLOUD-38234, CONFCLOUD-30867 and CONFCLOUD-4884.