We at the Fairphone Forum decided to go ahead and start using this feature even though it’s not supported yet.
We hope that giving you an example of a working forum using this cool feature is a better motivation to work on implementing it than just some fancy mockups.
So, please come check it out!
Here is the introduction post to flag-tags in our forum:
and here is the list of tags:
###What works already:
- Contrary to my last post above in general this works with all Regional Indicator Symbols.
- Like with all other tags you can now see all threads of the same language and follow or mute a language.
- So far we have been using discourse’s emojis (
, 
, 
, …) in the topic title, which is by far the inferior solution. Searching for topics of the same language is a pain. Searching for “:de:” will show all (or better yet 50) topics that contain “de” in the title. Searching for “:it:” will yield zero results as “it” doesn’t count as a word.
###What doesn’t work yet:
- Not everybody can see (all of) these flags.
- The post I linked above includes a guide to make it work on almost all computers and Android phones, but a way to let every user see the flags without having to install an emoji font would be great.
- If you don’t see the flags you see
🇩 🇪, 🇫 🇷, 🇳 🇱, 🇮 🇹, 🇪 🇸...which is usually also quite clear. - but still we decided to keep using the flags in the topic title as well (for now).
- You can’t easily #mention an emoji-tag, you’ll have to enter e.g.
[🇬🇧](https://forum.fairphone.com/tags/%F0%9F%87%AC%F0%9F%87%A7) - You can’t tag a topic without having to copy-paste the flag unless it’s in the top 5 tags.
- (Minor issue): Even if you copy paste the flag you get a suggestion as though the tag was never used before. So without the “(x17)”.
This is only an issue if you e.g. copied the flag of Clipperton Island🇨🇵instead of France🇫🇷and you don’t see that you are creating a new tag instead of tagging the topic as french (happened to me). - PS: Searching for flag-tags also doesn’t work yet. It would be cool to be able to e.g. search all Italian topics on Margherita, if you’re not interested in the Spanish Margherita atm.
###So in conclusion
It’s already quite a nice feature, but if discourse starts supporting it this will be epic.