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. They were introduced on /sp/, /int/, and /pol/ on 3 July 2012.

Country Flags
From /flags/+/extraflags/ book o' lore. 4chan has been using country flags since the 2nd of July, 2012. Flags were first implemented on /sp/ and /int/ on this date, along with the first memeflags on /pol/. Then two years later on the 15th of December, 2014 country flags were also added to /pol/, replacing the memeflags. On the 13th of June, 2017, memeflags were returned to /pol/ alongside country flags. For three years these were the only boards to have flags, but on the 4th of May, 2017 /bant/ was created. As this is being written only these four boards have geolocation flags. On the 1st of May, 2021, flags were added to /mlp/ that represent different characters. 80 in total were added, but the board designed over 300. During June of 2022, /lgbt/ got pride flags. They were removed in July. Flags are found on 4chan’s servers both as individual gif files and as a single png flagsheet, but when you see flags while browsing you are seeing little snippets of the flagsheet that have been cropped out. Clicking on a flag will open the gif file in a new tab. As a result of updates to 4chan’s flags there have been eight flagsheets in total, but so far only four have been found. Comparing flagsheets allows us to see how individual flags have changed and when flags were added, and therefore we can determine the history of 4chan flags.

4chan’s flags were created by UK-based developer Mark James for his website FAMFAMFAM back in 2005, seven years prior to their usage on 4chan. Mark released the first version of these flags on the 30th of August, 2005, then would go on to release a second version of his flag set on the 2nd of February, 2007 where he revised 4 flag designs and added 8 more flags to the set. Angola, the DR Congo, Saint Lucia, and the UK were redesigned, while Catalonia, the European Union, French Guiana, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Montenegro, Réunion, Serbia, and Svalbard and Jan Mayen were added as flags to the set. Flags made for the second update have a different build quality compared to flags from the first version; they are generally about 100 bytes smaller due to stronger compression and use a milder gloss (Serbia barely has any gloss at all). 4chan uses this 2007 version of the flag set, explaining why our flags of Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Guadeloupe, Lesotho, Mauritania, Paraguay, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and Venezuela are currently outdated as these countries have changed their flags since around 2007 or Mark James intentionally used their older flags.

4chan has gone through six evident flagsheet updates, although the most recent flagsheet is named ‘flags.8.png’ which implies there have been seven updates instead. The exact dates and order of flag updates is hazy and more information is required to validate details. Initially, 4chan used FAM’s default flag set; however, many of these flags—which were made in 2007—were outdated by 2012. This briefly allowed users to seemingly post from the Netherlands Antilles and the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya despite the countries dissolving years prior. 4chan uses MaxMind’s GeoIP database to assign a poster’s IP to a country, but this database assigned IP ranges to countries and territories that did not have flags included in the 2007 FAM set. This forced Antarctica, Curaçao, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Saint Martin, Sint Maarten, and South Sudan to hoist the Unknown flag if posted and were named ‘Country: Unknown’ when hovered over. Despite the ‘Country: Unknown’ name, the gif files themselves were named properly according to their country domain code. In other words, if you saved one of these Unknown flags, they would have the filename, for example, ‘gg.gif’ (Guernsey), or ‘je.gif’ (Jersey). This allowed third-party archives to properly display the country or territory a poster was from despite the Unknown flag and name. Even today archives such as 4plebs and Desuarchive still use the same flagsheet from 2012 where they created their own custom flags for the aforementioned countries and territories. Back on 4chan, and interestingly, Montenegro and Serbia were also named ‘Country: Unknown’ despite having their proper flags. The same issue affected Åland Islands and Timor-Leste, but they were instead just named ‘Unknown’.

Released late 2012, 4chan’s first flag update removed the Netherlands Antilles and replaced it with Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba. It is not known whether Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba had its current flag (a copy of the Netherlands) or the Unknown flag as its first recorded post is from October 2013. Countries and territories with the Unknown flag had their name changed from ‘Country: Unknown’ to their country domain code. For example, upon hover, Curaçao was named ‘CW’, Jersey was named ‘JE’, South Sudan would have been ‘SS’, and so on… Despite the name changes they still hoisted the Unknown flag if posted.

On the 2nd of January, 2013, the second flag update was released and introduced revised flags for Antarctica, Curaçao, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Libya, Saint Martin, Sint Maarten, and South Sudan. This update also fixed the names for these countries and territories, replacing the country domain codes with proper names. Notably, Libya was renamed from ‘Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’ to ‘Libya’ as well. Since /extraflags/ and its tools weren't around yet these flags were created without gloss and still remain without gloss to this day. Libya’s flag looks like it has gloss, but upon closer inspection it can be seen that the middle stripe of the triband has no gloss and the top and bottom stripes are upside down textures from other flags. Antarctica’s white flag is seemingly the Unknown flag without the question mark. Montenegro and Serbia were given correct names but Åland Islands and Timor-Leste were still named ‘Unknown’.

In April 2014, 4chan’s third flag update simply renamed Åland Islands from ‘Unknown’ to ‘Aland’. Unfortunately, this update did not fix Timor-Leste’s name as well so it remains as ‘Unknown’ to this day. Later in July, for 4chan’s fourth flag update, Ecuador’s Coat of Arms was added to its flag to perhaps differentiate it from the very similar Colombian flag. Ecuador’s flag was not remade from scratch—rather, the Coat of Arms was simply pasted onto the existing flag.

4chan’s sixth flag update in 2017 brought about five flag redesigns. The blue band of France’s tricolour had been darkened, a single yellow pixel from the US flag had been removed, Vatican City was resized from 16x11 pixels to 11x11 pixels, Uzbekistan was remade with lighter, more accurate colours, and Western Sahara’s flag was reversed so its red triangle was correctly placed on the left-hand side. This update may have been the start of /extraflags/ users contributing to 4chan’s flags, with them creating the current Uzbekistan and Vatican City flags from scratch using a custom gloss to closely resemble Mark James’ FAM flags. Similarly, in 2019, 4chan’s seventh and most recent flag update introduced a revised Myanmar flag by /extraflags/ users and also added Kosovo to the set, which also hoisted a flag created by /extraflags/ users.

Ecuador went through 3 flag changes. The first being the Ecuadorian flag without the Coat of arms, the second being with the Coat of arms, and the third being with the Coat of Arms slightly changed.

Users of /sp/ could post as the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales following the UEFA EURO 2020 football championships. This feature returned during the 2022 World Cup. It is unknown why these flags are returned to the Union Jack marked as "United Kingdom" outside specific events, and why this feature isn't implemented on other boards.

Western Sahara, the United States Minor Outlying Islands, and Heard and Mcdonald Islands cannot be collected as legitimate since they have no legitimate/official internet service providers.

North Korea and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands when posted with some local WiFi hotspots will show as China and the Falkland Islands. This will also happen with Guernsey WiFi, instead of posting as Guernsey, it will show as Jersey. Cuba doesn't have public Internet access due to the Communist Regime, and thus cannot be legitimately collected. North Korea and Turkmenistan have WiFi in certain hotels and hotspots. These show up as their separate countries and their geoIP locations as both North Korea and Turkmenistan.

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. It also appears when posting from an IP range that 4chan doesn't have a location for. 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. A1, A2, AP (anonymous satellite providers) are now defunct as they were a glitch, they could not be saved and could only be collected through screenshot. These flags looked like the flag of Andorra. A1 was known as “Anonymous Proxy”, A2 was known as “Satellite Provider” and AP was known as “Asia/Pacific Region”. All these flags were labeled as “Unknown” instead of using the “question mark” flag.

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

Updated 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. Flags were added to /pol/ on 3 July 2012. Sadly there are no archives of /pol/ from that time, and archives of other boards are missing images (otherwise I'd have more than one screenshot). These flags could not be chosen and were instead randomly assigned per post. From reading people talking about it on other boards in the archives, a few of these first-generation flags can be gleaned:

>Dong flag

>Hipster flag, which is an Apple icon

>Retard flag, which is a reddit icon

>The infamous Brotherhood of NOD flag

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. Random was replaced a few months later with the option to not use a flag.

/mlp/ Character Flags
During a town hall sticky in Feburary 2021, an Anon suggested that flags be added to /mlp/. The mod agreed and asked the board to design some flags, and the horsefuckers quickly got to work. The designs went through several iterations and a few large threads before they settled on the final design and got to work turning every pony into a flag. In the end, the mods chose 80 to be added to the board. They were added on 1 May 2021. You can see every flag that was made here: https://www.duendeinexistente.com/flags/

/lgbt/ Pride Month Flags
For Pride Month 2022, /lgbt/ got pride flags. TODO: crop and label them