missing flag - northern Ireland

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/countries-and-profile

A previous thread on this very topic was interesting. An attempt to explain was offered by CEO Erik but the thread ended up in flames anyway.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/dulce-et-decorum-est

Fair point. I guess I was just looking to avoid using the UK flag. I guess wales will do for now. (although Northern Ireland is brought up in the thread it isn't an available option).  Europe or UN would do as well.

Bumping this. We have Wales, Scotland, England, Untied Kingdom, and Republic of Ireland. We need Northern Ireland too, please.

How is Palestine an option and Northern Ireland isn’t? I thought there was consistency (because there are other disputed regions as options, even regions which no one regards as an independent country), but not having Northern Ireland makes it completely inconsistent.

And then you throw in the removal of the Russian flag, but that’s a different topic altogether haha

We in Northern Ireland are in a weird spot. Unlike others such as Palestine or other debatable states where using a flag could cause political issues (catalonia etc). Northern Ireland is a unique case, where using the UK flag or The Ireland flag...essentially is politically forcing the Northern Irish to choose a side.

So I decided to reach out directly to chess.com

The short of the response basically was we were too late to the party and they do not want to be political, they lean on Fide for this. Saying its up to them. Northern Ireland is part of Irelands Chess Fide... So everyone in Northern Ireland ACCORDING to chess.com is Irish and choose the Irish Flag as that's how we are set up in FIDE.

So one could debate that Chess.com in effect has either A) got political by being ignorant and refuse to accept the Northern Irish identity as its part of Irelands Fide. B) Sick of it all and will just ignore no matter what. Go and sign Northern Ireland up to FIDE if you want the Flag.

I thought I'd run down a brief history of which flags we used, and why, to let you know how we got here.
First off, we accepted flags from UN nations AND from FIDE organizations. For example, if Catalonia was not a country, but it had a FIDE org, we'd add it. Then, and this is before my time with the company so please don't blame me for our foolishness here, we made the mistake of adding the flags of people who requested them.

Chess.com is APOLITCIAL, and we were simply trying to be nice about what region or area a player wanted to identify as being from. We were young, naïve, and the vast majority of our users were from the US. We thought being welcoming in that way would be a nice gesture. However, we quickly learned from a series of complaints that adding flags caused a great deal of anger in our other customers who felt like we were making a political statement.
That's not Chess.com's intention or place in this world.
So, our owner made the decision to stop accepting new flags, and just to keep the ones we had.
So, here we are. We have flags from countries, we have flags from FIDE orgs, and we have some random flags which are a little weird. If you want to write a nicely worded letter about your thoughts, I can pass those on to our owner.
What I want to be absolutely clear on is that Chess.com is not in the business of deciding what area is a country and what is not. We were simply trying to be accommodating, and no user should look at the flags we have as a statement of political support or a statement of denigration to any country or political body.