[civilian]

In American English quotations are often used to mark something as not-quite-the-truth. There's even a blog where we point out mis-used quotations: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

example: Today I "talked" to my brother. (But I actually just instant-messaged him.)

edit: crap, I may have just misread your comment, did you mean </flame> to be like a </sarcasm> tag? Regardless, you were downvoted by others, so I thought I should help explain since you're foreign.

You should also consider advertising the conference as: "php-ist Istanbul: Now with extra watercannon!"

[_b8r0]

In British/International English air quotes are often used to emphasise something, and not necessarily as a sarcasm or BS indicator.

Also what the hell do the protests in Gezi park have to do with PHP? Turkey's about more than just protests.

[thejbf]

> In British/International English air quotes are often used to emphasise something.

It's not entirely true that quotation marks used to be used to indicate emphasis outside the US. It's a wrongly practiced habit to have double quotes instead of using italics for phrases that requires bolder emphasis, and usually leads to misunderstandings.

[yuxel]

lots of other communities are representing 'installing wordpress', 'most useful wordpress plugins', 'top 120 drupal themes' and we consider these communities are more like 'user groups' than 'developer groups' (especially in Turkey). And we want 'php-ist to be a developers group' . So there's a little sarcasm on quoting 'cutting edge'.

But as I'm not a native English speaker I can change/update/remove this, if this lead to a misunderstanding.