##What is this?
These are so called Regional Indicator Symbols, a set of country flags encoded from the following 26 alphabetic unicode characters: 🇦 🇧 🇨 🇩 🇪 🇫 🇬 🇭 🇮 🇯 🇰 🇱 🇲 🇳 🇴 🇵 🇶 🇷 🇸 🇹 🇺 🇻 🇼 🇽 🇾 🇿
Adding two of them together creates a country flag. e.g. 🇩+ 🇪 = 🇩🇪, 🇫 + 🇷 = 🇫🇷 and 🇳+ 🇱 = 🇳🇱.
##Why should I care?
We could start using them in this forum to tag non-english topics instead of adding :nl:, , :no:, … in the topic title.
##Why?
The advantages of using them as tags would be:
You can easily display all topics of the same language by simply clicking on the tag.
You can mute all topics in languages you don’t understand
You can follow all topics in a language that you can speak to make sure your fellow countrymen who don’t speak english get help.
If something changes with the encoding of the symbol we can simply rename the tag. Now when something changes we have to manually rename all topics that use country flags or else we get stuck with lots of topics that start with " instead of “”.
##Then why don’t we use them already?
The disadvantages of these unicode flags are:
It depends on your platform, browser and installed fonts whether you can see these symbols as flags. An update to the forum software won’t fix symbols that don’t display properly. (At least not yet)
As opposed to other tags you can’t mention these like this: #🇮🇹. But that’s probably not something that will be dearly missed.
You can’t tag a topic by simply typing letters and symbols, but have to copy-paste the actual flag symbol from somewhere. (e.g. this Wikipedia Article under “List of current emoji flag sequences”.
Switching from the old system to the flag-tags system would mean we’d have to again manually rename & tag all non-english topics. But it would be the last time.
##So do you think we should do the switch?
Yes, this is cool.
Yes, if someone explains to me how to be able to display all the flags on all my devices
No, because I don’t see the flags and also don’t want to update the OS on the device I use to browse this forum.
I only see 10. The other 10 display as letters in boxes for me. It is probably because I haven’t updated my OSX in a long time and am very reluctant to do so.
On my FP2 I see all 20.
This is a wiki post.
Please add your device + OS + browser + special configurations and signal whether the emojis work. If you find a way to make them work please add that as an extra entry.
##Legend: (:flag_black:)…all flags work (:flag_white:)…some flags work (:x:)…flags don’t work (:grey_question:)…no reports yet
Works fine on my Open OS FP2 with Firefox.
Does not work on my Kubuntu 16.10 with Firefox 51 (I block cookies and similar stuff so it might be because of that).
Firefox on my FP2 shows the flags. IE10 on Windows 8.1 shows only the respective letters (ES, FR, IT, NL, DE). But I think showing the respective letters instead of flags would be OK, too.
What I wish if this is introduced is an instruction how to mute topics in foreign languages.
Good idea. Here it is. If and when we introduce this I’ll make a post explaining this as well as hopefully some ways to get the flags to show on different systems.
First tap on a tag. No matter if you see it as a flag or just letter-symbols, you’ll get to the tag view, where you will see the flag:
You won’t see the “rename tag” and “delete tag” buttons, but besides that is a button to choose the notification level:
Setting it to “regular” is probably best if it’s a language you don’t speak.
Otherwise you won’t even be notified if you are mentioned or quoted.
I’m not a hundred 100% sure about multilanguage threads, but I believe watching or tracking one tag outweighs muting (or “regularing”) another one.
So e.g. if a thread is tagged with and and you follow but muted you’ll still get notified. Whereas if you don’t explicitly follow a thread tagged with and will be silenced for you.
, :no:, … in the topic title.
instead of “
”.
(
(
(
(
and 
and you follow 
a thread tagged with