Replace Location string field with country flags/dropdown selection

[Noxxaa]

The current system of having a string field for location hasn't been in vogue since the 2000s when this first became a regular thing on forums. It also opens up room for abuse, putting profanity in there, or people not exactly understanding the limits of what information they should share on the internet and doxxing their home address (this is, concerningly, a semi-regular occurrence that moderators have to deal with). This borders between being an annoyance to moderation staff, to becoming a legal liability in the worst case.

I propose replacing the Location string field with a dropdown Country flag/field, in the same way SRCom does it. This would be visible on the user's profile like this:

This would be set in the user settings in a dropdown like this:

And optionally a sub-region field for relevant countries (e.g. U.S. states):

The country flag is both more colorful and compact than the current location field, and makes users easier to distinguish and identify. It also does not give users an outlet to potentially doxx themselves to any significant extent.

[YoshiRulz]

edit: #2182 Perhaps these oversharing users are being misled by the location of the location field: info shown publically on your profile and posts is intermingled with settings which affect the behaviour of the frontend, which are intuitively private. They would ideally be on 2 separate pages.

[adelikat]

I really like this idea, would love to see this enhancement

[Spikestuff]

Is there a way for at least those that are going "Custom" to be able to select a country flag if they desire, or another type of flag such as 🏳️‍🌈 or 🏴‍☠️ for instance (obviously in the large format that I know they have).

[Masterjun3]

They're regular emojis, so you can just... type them.

[Masterjun3]

Oh, looking at your comment on my desktop computer made me understand what you meant. The "flag with pole" vs "flag without pole" is part of the font and depends on your operating system font and all that fun stuff.

Look for example how my desktop vs my phone displays your comment:

[Spikestuff]

Yeah sorry wasn't really thinking on how to clarify what I meant, but definitely with what I meant that goes on with the right. There are other flags, that are only visible on mobile such as-- 🏳️‍⚧️ --which no idea if that'll work.

[YoshiRulz]

There's no "only visible on mobile", it's entirely dependent on whether the font that your browser ends up using includes (coloured) glyphs for those characters / combining sequences. Because Chrome on Windows didn't have a font covering those glyphs, Masterjun set up a web font in #2183.

[Spikestuff]

I'm referring to when you have to make the flag on Windows 10 where the Transgender flag (for the instance I was using) actually doesn't exist in Windows 10's emoji set, but does for Windows 11.

But if what Masterjun set up is via the Firefox solution... which is based on Twemoji. Then that would mean it's possible to expose the other flags as well like European Union, or Pirate, or Checkered. Wouldn't it?

Again this is mainly like allowing those that have it set to "Custom" to have fun with something the site supports, rather than not with flags on poles.

(Masterjun at least got what I meant by the flag stuff fwiw.)

[Masterjun3]

Yes it is possible, but we're currently relying on a separate font package provided by some dude who spent a lot of effort getting the details right. Specifically for the country flags. Setting up all the stuff to include special other emojis is possible, but it's honestly more effort than I'm personally willing to put in. We'd then also have to self-host the font, which is unfortunate.

[YoshiRulz]

The EU flag already works. Any combining sequence apart from country flags, such as the pirate flag, won't work because those codepoints aren't included in the font file. I imagine if the original Twemoji font was referenced then they would.

~~While investigating this, I found out Bootstrap already includes an emoji font (Noto Color Emoji), which covers all the flags.~~ I think I was wrong. But if you have the font installed, currently applying that to an element causes regular text to be spaced incorrectly (was the @font-face set up wrong?): What does work is font-family: initial;, but that might be the system font again.