All done and now when an emoji is used the topic reply, topic add or topic edit save and they appear in the post.  Excellent thanks for your help and tom over on Gvectors.

Thank you optical!

Only on odd thing I notice now is that when some emoji are selected in the post editor, they don't appear as emoji just as a block. However when the post is saved they do appear correctly. 

This one is a browser issue. Not all browsers supports Emoji well. Try other browsers or devices. This is the list of browsers which supports Emoji:

http://blog.getemoji.com/post/57054354336/which-browsers-support-emoji

Only on odd thing I notice now is when some are selected from the drop down menu they appear as just a block in the post editor. However when the post is saved it is displayed in the forum correctly. Is this an MCE interpretation problem?

Also:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/04/02/the-utf8mb4-upgrade/

https://gvectors.com/wp-content/uploads/wpforo/attachments/6163/1657-dbcharset.png

This is an old charset, current version of WordPress and wpForo requires utf8mb4_unicode_ci charset.

SOLUTION

Make sure your hosting service MySQL version is 5.5.3 and higher. You can check it in Dashboard > Forums > Dashboard admin page.

To check the charset please open your website database manager (phpMyAdmin) and check the charset of your forum tables. In Your website hosting service > cPanel > phpMyAdmin tool open the database table list and check, the right charset is utf8mb4_unicode_ci or utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci:

https://gvectors.com/wp-content/uploads/wpforo/attachments/1/1656-2017-12-120158.png

You should ask your hosting service to change all tables with _wpforo_ prefix to the mentioned charset.

In case you want to do that yourself, just execute this SQL queries in Hosting Service cPanel > phpMyAdmin database manager, navigate to SQL Tab. If your WordPress table prefix is not wp_   replace all wp_ prefixes in this code to your database table prefixes, if they are wp_ just use it as is:

SET SQL_MODE = "NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO";
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_forums` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_languages` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_likes` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_phrases` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_posts` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_profiles` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_topics` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_usergroups` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_views` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_visits` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_votes` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

If you have wpForo Private Messages addon, it's recommended to do the same for PM tables:

SET SQL_MODE = "NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO";
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_pmfolders` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE `wp_wpforo_pms` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;