Flags



Five boards on 4chan currently have flags. Four of them have country flags, which display the country you're posting from (or the location of your VPN or proxy if you are using one.) Flags are used on 4chan as a method of pseudo-identification.

Country Flags
Country flags, or geoflags, display the country of the IP address that was used to submit a post. This flag is displayed to the right of a poster's name, or to the right of their ID, depending on the board. There are around 254 countries that can appear. During certain sporting events, /sp/ gains specific flags for England, Scotland, and Wales. These flags can very rarely be found on /pol/ and /bant/ if a thread is moved from /sp/. Outside of these events, posting from one of those countries would normally display a Union Jack labelled United Kingdom.

Unknown Flag
"Unknown" is a relatively common flag on 4chan. It appears when a thread is moved from a board without flags to a board with them, as on flag-boards ever post must have one. Its ID is XX.

Rare Flags
Certain flags are more common to find than others. Countries with very low populations, or limited access to the Internet can be very rare to come across while browsing 4chan. These are often referred to as rare flags, and are pointed out by many when they are sighted.

Retired Flags
There are various flags that have been retired, and now will no longer appear on posts from their previous IP ranges. Not much is known about them; we can only infer from the archives that they have been retired due to an extremely long time since the last post from that country.

'''Note: Andorra is used as a placeholder for regions that don't have flags. This list may be inaccurate due to incomplete archives.'''

Outdated Flags
Over the years some flags have been updated.

Anomalous Flags
These flags are incredibly rare and were probably only ever used by 4chan staff.

Board Flags
Board flags, previously troll flags, are colloquially referred to as memeflags by most posters. These flags are not determined by poster location, and instead can be chosen from a drop-down menu underneath the posting field.

Pre /pol/ Harbor
Prior to the event known as /pol/ Harbor, there were no country flags on /pol/, only board flags. Most returned in 2017 but some did not.

In the first half of 2013, these flags were randomly assigned:

Sometime in late August or early September, these were replaced with the drop-down and many new flags. There was no option to not post with one of these, and the default choice was random.

/mlp/ Character Flags
-board town hall feb 2021

-anon proposes flags, twimod agrees

-board designs flags for a couple weeks

-eventually 80 get added, 319 were made in total: https://www.duendeinexistente.com/flags/

/lgbt/ Pride Month Flags
-/lgbt/ got flags for pride month (June) 2022

-todo: crop and label them