In early days of Skara, GitLab did not have a proper way to approve a "merge request", so to work around that, Skara implemented reviews through award emojis (thumbsup and thumbsdown) which are available. Since then, there is now an "approve" button that we prefer to use, and in https://github.com/openjdk/skara/pull/939 , support for award emojis was deprecated (by adding a warning message when used). I think it's time we remove this support completely.

Removing this will reduce complexity a bit, but most of all I believe it will enable us to trust the "updated_at" field for GitLab merge requests, which can have a pretty major impact on bot performance.