Of course, I can file a demand via the special website our ICT department created to report ICT problems (like “my internet doesn’t work, so I can’t access your website”) and wait a few weeks for a response…
But for some reason, I think I can live with not seeing any flags if this solution is the only one that would work
I think for the sake of the widest possible accessibility, the solution should be one that requires the least action on the forum users’ part. Perhaps that means leaving the status quo unchanged.
I hope in the future flag-tags will be officially supported by Discourse, so we could wait for that.
Or we could be pioneers and show them how cool this feature is, present a working forum that uses them instead of just drawing mockups and thereby hopefully speed up Discourse’s integration of that function.
On Sailfish OS the symbols don’t work out of the box in the default Jolla Browser but after installing emojione-color-font package from the unofficial repos (OpenRepos.net/Warehouse) the symbols are shown correctly. A lot of people use the Warehouse app to install packages from the unofficial repos at OpenRepos.net so it’s probably not a big issue.
I’m sure there’s a few other options like embedding fonts in CSS or a little javascript regexp-like routine to replace occurrences of these UTF character combinations to HTML images…
I agree that the cleanest solution is for every user to install this font, but that’s also quite a thing to ask from a user who is rightfully distrusting of any website telling you to install stuff on their computer. Are you sure there’s no other viable solution than having the user install a font on every machine (thereby breaking backwards compatibility)?
Well there is a discussion on meta.discourse on how to implement this without effort of the forum-user:
Maybe you could log in there and get the discussion going.
I agree we shouldn’t ask users to install something on their devices to enjoy basic functions of the forum, but:
45% of users said it works for them out of the box and probably most others “only” need to update their OS and/or browser - which is a good idea for security reasons anyway.
Those who don’t see the flags see the tags as a combination of two letters, which is usually very easy to understand too (🇩 🇪, 🇫 🇷, 🇳 🇱, 🇮 🇹, 🇪 🇸, … ).
Even if you don’t see the flags you can enjoy the same benefits compared to our old way (see all topics of the same language, silence or follow a language)
So I don’t think users would feel pressured to install a font. If they don’t see the tags as flags by default, some will install the font because they like the idea of seeing the flags, others won’t, because they don’t care - or because they’d rather wait for flag-tags to become a core function of discourse.
We could - as an interim solution - use the tags and keep the flags in the topic title for a while. Then everybody can still see the flags.
We could do it like that until everybody gets tired of the duplicate flags in their list of topics:
Sorry @paulakreuzer, i currently have to rely on FP Open OS, so sadly, I don’t have time for distro-hopping on my daily driver phone My guess is that it won’t work, the Ubuntu Webbrowser App on the desktop does not show the flags, but i’m not sure about the phone version.
I think we should still migrate to Unicode chars, just because it’s awesome. Unicode is the future, so support is only going to get better.
)
Here is how it works on all computers:
My guess is that it won’t work, the Ubuntu Webbrowser App on the desktop does not show the flags, but i’m not sure about the phone version.