So What I Was Thinking Is The Scratch Team Should Add The Country Flags As Emojis So An Example _UK_ = The UK Flag And For The US It Could Be _US_ Or _USA_


So Thats What I Was Thinking.



Thanks For Reading This Suggestion

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Also, the triggers you mentioned ( _US_ and _UK_ ) are abbreviations of actual countries. Some countries, like Canada, have no abbreviation. Would those be triggered with _canada_?

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Also, the triggers you mentioned ( _US_ and _UK_ ) are abbreviations of actual countries. Some countries, like Canada, have no abbreviation. Would those be triggered with _canada_?

WOW! I had No Idea That There Were Almost 200 Country's In The World And For Canada They Would Probably Probably Just Do That

This looks awfully difficult to implement.

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

They wouldn't have to be particularly large images, and if they were to be stored as SVG files then each one would be pretty small regardless of image size; most flags are comprised of only a few simple geometric shapes.

Also, 195 may sound like a lot of images, but that's nothing compared to how many unique Scratch profile pictures there are.

I do see the concern over having to create a unique image for each country, but as I stated previously, most flags are very simple, and Wikipedia already has vector flags for most(?) countries in the world.

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Also, the triggers you mentioned ( _US_ and _UK_ ) are abbreviations of actual countries. Some countries, like Canada, have no abbreviation. Would those be triggered with _canada_?

ca could be used as an abbreviation for Canada

anyways, I believe the ST is/was at one point looking into supporting standard emoticons and symbols which would include the country flags.

No support for this reason:

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Codingfairy07 wrote:

No support for this reason:

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Za-Chary* wrote:

Hot take: Saying “If we add one emoji then we have to add a billion others” is not good reasoning for rejecting an emoji suggestion.

(src)
The pride emoji is 4KB and the BLM emoji is 3KB. The average (mean and median) is 3.5KB. 3.5 * 195 is 682.5. 682.5KB isn't that much space, plus the quote from Za-Chary.

dhuls wrote:

Za-Chary* wrote:

Hot take: Saying “If we add one emoji then we have to add a billion others” is not good reasoning for rejecting an emoji suggestion.

(src)
The pride emoji is 4KB and the BLM emoji is 3KB. The average (mean and median) is 3.5KB. 3.5 * 195 is 682.5. 682.5KB isn't that much space, plus the quote from Za-Chary.

So I know this is going to sound confusing, although I acknowledge that I did say that, I was probably referring to “most” examples of emojis. In particular, the suggestions on adding a grape emoji and a rat emoji came to my mind. I don't see a reason why we would have to add “all fruits” or “all animals” if we added one new fruit/animal emoji. (Related to that, we added an apple emoji and a cat emoji, but most other fruits and animals are not represented in emojis on Scratch. That renders the argument somewhat useless in those cases.)

However, I think I will call an exception with countries. It does make sense, for inclusivity reasons, to claim that we can't just add one country flag emoji. If we added a USA flag only, then everyone who is not from the USA will feel excluded. Lather, rinse, repeat for every country with a flag.

Za-Chary wrote:

dhuls wrote:

Za-Chary* wrote:

Hot take: Saying “If we add one emoji then we have to add a billion others” is not good reasoning for rejecting an emoji suggestion.

(src)
The pride emoji is 4KB and the BLM emoji is 3KB. The average (mean and median) is 3.5KB. 3.5 * 195 is 682.5. 682.5KB isn't that much space, plus the quote from Za-Chary.

So I know this is going to sound confusing, although I acknowledge that I did say that, I was probably referring to “most” examples of emojis. In particular, the suggestions on adding a grape emoji and a rat emoji came to my mind. I don't see a reason why we would have to add “all fruits” or “all animals” if we added one new fruit/animal emoji. (Related to that, we added an apple emoji and a cat emoji, but most other fruits and animals are not represented in emojis on Scratch. That renders the argument somewhat useless in those cases.)

However, I think I will call an exception with countries. It does make sense, for inclusivity reasons, to claim that we can't just add one country flag emoji. If we added a USA flag only, then everyone who is not from the USA will feel excluded. Lather, rinse, repeat for every country with a flag.

Yes, additionally, people might start calling for state flags, which would be a bit too far. Then there’s all those tiny little territories countries own, and well, it would just be a big mess.

For any issues with abbreviation the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes can be used, which is the same place they got their list of countries.

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

The _meow_ emoji takes up 1.6 kilobytes (I downloaded it to check), so 195 emojis would take up 312 kilobytes. Not that much.

I would rather support unicode emojis, anyways, because those allow for much more than just country flags.

Bump

Bump

That's A Good Idea!

kat-coder wrote:

That's A Good Idea!

Because??? This is a discussion forum, not a ballot box.

Anyway, I semi-support. I can see how these would be used on mapping projects, but not really elsewhere.

mtech22 wrote:

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Also, the triggers you mentioned ( _US_ and _UK_ ) are abbreviations of actual countries. Some countries, like Canada, have no abbreviation. Would those be triggered with _canada_?

ca could be used as an abbreviation for Canada

anyways, I believe the ST is/was at one point looking into supporting standard emoticons and symbols which would include the country flags.

Ca is the abbreviation for California. Some people might get confused…

lisagu wrote:

mtech22 wrote:

wangat wrote:

There are currently (approx) 195 countries in the world. To make Scratch all-inclusive for each country, the Scratch Team would have to make 195 emojis, which may take up quite a lot of server space.

Also, the triggers you mentioned ( _US_ and _UK_ ) are abbreviations of actual countries. Some countries, like Canada, have no abbreviation. Would those be triggered with _canada_?

ca could be used as an abbreviation for Canada

anyways, I believe the ST is/was at one point looking into supporting standard emoticons and symbols which would include the country flags.

Ca is the abbreviation for California. Some people might get confused…

Maybe _CA_ triggers California, _Canada_ Triggers Canada if this is implemented (I still don't support, though)

Unicode has all of the country flags as emojis, so if the Scratch Team allowed full Unicode emojis in comments, you could type all of the country flags. This would probably be best as it not only contains the flags but also most other emojis I’ve seen suggested.

Also, the Canada flag could be used with _can_ if the Scratch Team added a bunch of country flags instead of adding full Unicode support.

Hi, 120 Second Rule. How are you?