Your example shows the exact opposite of what you are saying. Clearly the flag represents the region and not the language on fairphone.com
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Def they are everywhere and I more and more feel I cant move the little finger without stumbling probably on someones feet somehow.
Before we talk about if its appropriate to use language flags we might need to start flagging all comments mentioning “chinese phones” e.g… And where start and where to end with such?
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I just remembered there was a moderator option to create tags in bulk by oploading a csv to the forum, will try later today when l have my laptop to see if it works for flags (except if another mod has the time to try).
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Its a flag…or not even it’s colored pixels arranged to look like a flag.
If that even causes people to feel uncomfortable…that is pretty worrying.
It’s used as nothing more then a pictograph to quickly and simply show some info.
And we are talking about (I assume) normal flags of existing countries…it’s not like putting the Nazi flag above a topic.
People are so good at finding problems where there are none.
But hey…that’s just me.
I feel if it bothers you (what ever it is) don’t look at it.
That is key in living in harmony…not to try and please some by taking away what others find totally normal.
But just agree that some think this…some think that…
It’s ok if 1 does not like something and equally ok when another does.
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I just think that people are much better in quickly processing images (in this case the flag) than written text (describing a language or region). This is why I prefer the icons (flags) although I can well understand the concerns with that.
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Thanks for giving me a reason to try out the block user function.
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That would be interesting.
I’m still for consistency at least for countries/ territories … have them all, or don’t have them.
If to have them all would involve a lot of work to assemble the CSV, I would volunteer.
Even if I personally like how it looks here in the forum … conceptually, mapping national flags to languages 1:1 is not ideal, that much is clear, even without touching the topics of potentially taking offence or of known political cans of worms.
That language indicators are pretty practical to have should also be clear. In case the use of flags for this would be discontinued, something else would need to be used.
Since we will not solve anything worldwide here and now, we can safely concentrate on this forum here. Whatever gets used should be available to users to either initiate or quickly find topics with an indication of the language. And it should be easily accessible and understandable, so …
… language names (lower case, underscores instead of spaces), or if names need too much space perhaps (thinking of topic titles once more), ISO 639-2/B?
I asked, but no response so far:
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Very interesting aspect! I´ve never thought about it this way, yet
I can also understand this aspect:
… especially when thinking about people with (less or more) dyslexia. (Ok, maybe almost off-topic in a Forum where written text is mostly default 
)
But also from the practical aspect of space that it takes to indicate a language it could make sense to use a flag or a standard shortcut like international shortcuts.
Well, I´m not here to make such decisions … just to get input and all in all that comment from @paulakreuzer made me think about it 
Best
DonFnord
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Yes the Fairphone one was an example of how to do it 
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I tried, it doesn’t work, it outputs an error. Trying to add the 
tag to a topic makes the tag disappear just after, and trying to create it in the staff interface of tag groups seems to work, but as soon as you refresh the page, it disappears as well… No clue what the problem is…
Btw., there is a (nearly unused) Australian flag tag: #
so I think it’s not only about languages.
Edit; Typo
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Thanks for trying.
So the flags thing seems abandoned and the existing flag tags seem to be leftovers which continue to work nonetheless.
Just now it was used one more time .
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I always found the flags confusing, not only because these are country flags (not language flags), but also because I find it more difficult to understand the meaning of a flag than to read the name or abbreviation of a language.
There is a solution, though, for multilingual forums: the Multilingual Plugin.
I think this is what is used e.g. in the YunoHost forums and I quite like it.
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i think any confusion only started when @Stefan ended his moderator job here. Stefan had always made sure flags were exclusively used as a language indicator in topic titles and tags, not as a location marker. After him, this was left to any user’s will, and by now it’s all guesswork what a flag is supposed to mean.
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Closest to a solution yet for our forum, too, regarding languages I think.
Looking good.
On a side note, I went to the page for the first time, and they open with this (not to take anything away from their implementation of the plugin, only as an interesting data point regarding where else I would see such use, implementing the plugin they seem to be putting some thought into languages) …
So this plugin translates buttons to help you navigate easier? Else I cant see how it helpes to distinguish language of a topic or do I misunderstand something? So a bit easier to find then the interface plugin we use here I would say.
The Iode Forum uses the word in the country language e.g. “Deutsch” , instead of Flags, maybe the only way to prevent confusion, still we wont have Country/Community indicator then and what about the Angels map which is using the flags as well as country indicator?
I almost expected someone to mention this
I think they used the flags before the plugin existed.
The Multilingual Plugin post has an overview of the features and also some screenshots.
And I dont understand it in connection with this topic here especially not when looking at the Forum you link to 
for me it seems to be a translation tool
The Multilingual Plugin has more features than just language tags. But language tags are a part of it.
For example you can click on a language tag to filter for posts in that language. Or click on the language symbol in the top right of a page to select your language and check if there are any forum posts in that language. And I think it makes it also mandatory to select the used language(s) when you create a new post.
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