Sorting and searching members by geographic location?

[bekateen]

Hi,

I have two suggestions or questions about the Sort and Search functions within the Member listings:

I would like to find out if there are other catfish enthusiasts near my part of the world. Currently, we can sort the members by location, but the alphabetical location sorting occurs first by their city, then by state, then by country. This method of sorting results in somewhat unhelpful results because, for example, I would be found under S (for Stockton, California, USA), but if there were another member in, let's say Elk Grove, CA (only 30 minutes away from me), they would appear under E, and any nearby members who don't identify their hometown would appear under C for California. Would it be possible to change the Location sorting to reverse this order: first by country, then by state, and finally by city? That way, all three of us (that I described above) would be listed as USA, California and then two of us would be further listed by our city. It seems like this would make it much easier for nearby members to form networks if they wanted to.

Likewise, my other question is about the Search function: Could we add an option to the search criteria that allows us to search for members by geographic location (e.g., find all members in California), instead of simply searching for members by their specific names (which, if we know their name then we are already familiar with them), or by how long ago they joined or how many posts they have, etc.?

Thank you,
Eric (Bekateen)

[MatsP]

That's a good idea. Shame it's not very easy to achieve...

To solve it, would require quite a bit of work, and sometimes go very wrong, since there is for example no way to determine if Perth is in Australia or Scotland (unless the user actually specifies the country). And of course, whilst we encourage "proper" address in the location, there are plenty that aren't trivially identifiable.

Even if that wasn't hard, you'd still have to calculate the distance from location X to location Y for EVERY user, and then sort the users based on that - with 10000 users, that's a lot to sort with no help from the database.

It's OK for Facebook, that has thousands and thousands of machines, and a few thousand developers that can fiddle with code that "may be good, may not be". We have in practice about half a developer, between me and Jools. So we have to pick and choose what we develop with some care.

--
Mats

[bekateen]

Hi Mats,

Yes, I understand your points. I'm not a programmer; I don't know how hard or easy it would be, so I can only imagine that if it were easy, you probably would have done it already.

To clarify my idea, I didn't intend something so thorough as what you described. I wasn't thinking of physical distance in miles or kilometers, but simply a nested form of presentation of the data. It wouldn't tell me if Stockton, CA, USA is closer to Tracy, CA, USA or to Elk Grove, CA, USA; it would simply group all California cities together under the nest of California. And if a user didn't provide all info, then whatever location data they did supply would be listed alphabetically; to use your example of Perth, if that person didn't provide their home country, then Perth would be listed between Panama and Philippines.

I was hoping that it was as simple as telling the sort algorithm to rearrange the priority of the data fields when the "sort by location" function is activated.

Okay, well thanks for responding and thanks for considering the request.

Have a good day,
Eric

[JamesFish]

I agree this would be a great idea. However as well as coding it proving difficult you get other problems. For example our resident experts could easily be spammed with requests for help, viewings of the collections they keep. I remain blissfully safe as if you need my help you really are up s**t creek without a paddle. I keep basic fish, in rather basic setups with allot of hit or miss along the way.

So for privacy would suggest an opt in and out as required.

On a code based option perhaps using the zip codes and post codes (assume whole world has something of this description could easily be wrong) if we supply them in a new field would be most practical for the coders. If you don't fill it your out, if you fill it in, validate vaguely sensible, all fields included and from that place into a table. Now from that you should be able to determined country, than hope to god the numbering systems make sense and grab everyone from the same starting digits. You wont reveal the exact location of anyone and suggest you don't store full codes just in case. While this wouldn't provide a get everyone within X miles you could grab anyone nearby who wanted to be found.

[Bas Pels]

An idea could be to tell ones continent. I think that would help in many cases.

For instances, If I have a problem, and somebody suggests to use a product X I wonder whether it is available.

If the kind suggester lives in the USA chances are that for me, on the European continent, it might not be available.

But I might still be helped, if I know to look for something in the USA - or in Australia, or in Singapore. After all, the seller could mail it to me, or perhaps I find it is similar to something which is available over here

Without geografic information from the helper my search could be much harder

[bekateen]

Hi Jamesfish,
I see your point about privacy. I too was considering that problem when I started this thread. But as I thought about it, people already choose to provide their location as much or as little as they please when they set up their profiles, so the opt in/out option already exists. And, the members database already permits us to sort people by location, but it's just an alphabetical sorting, starting with city and nesting upward to country. My idea was not to release more info about members but simply to alter the way it's presented.

Fundamentally, I agree with you about the potential for spammers to take advantage of the members database. And if the proposed sort function was realistically possible, it would make it easier for sellers to target regional members. I think I'm operating under the premise that determined spammers will gather our info, as much as we release, either way.

Thanks for the perspective.
Eric

[bekateen]

An idea could be to tell ones continent. I think that would help in many cases.

For instances, If I have a problem, and somebody suggests to use a product X I wonder whether it is available.

If the kind suggester lives in the USA chances are that for me, on the European continent, it might not be available.

But I might still be helped, if I know to look for something in the USA - or in Australia, or in Singapore. After all, the seller could mail it to me, or perhaps I find it is similar to something which is available over here

Without geografic information from the helper my search could be much harder

Hi Bas Pels,
Yes that could be helpful. If the exchange you're describing occurs in a forum thread, then you could get locality data from the responding author's member info which appears on the right side of of the page, if they've chosen to release that info. But if a member has chosen to hide their location, I suspect it would be wrong for the website to provide any locality info, even if it's only continent.

Cheers,
Eric

[Jools]

Eric,

I've toyed with this a few times (anyone remember the map that showed where all members were located) and it would be a lot of work for limited benefit and would also require browsers to send data about location as text based location doesn't work. I could implement a country dropdown, but that's not much use for big countries. Because this is an international forum, it also means a global solution is required.

I think it will be resolved with further integration with social media sites that do record all that geo-location stuff - not something I think we will see anytime soon.



Jools

[MatsP]

Postal code can be used - IF we had it for all the users... (And as far as I know, this sort of information is available for most countries, and translating it to geographic location).

Sorting on "Country, Region, Town" would work fine if everyone actually entered their place as "USA, California, Stockton", or "UK, Cambridgeshire, Don't want to say", but there are all manner of different formatting.

I have a copy of the database for the fish data, but I can't look up the Location data (I notice that it's pretty empty in the official Location field for the Forum in the database, but we run a second one, to enforce the "You have to have a location" rule of the forum).

I don't have direct access to play with the user data (for data protection reasons - and honestly, I wouldn't want to be responsible for everyone's emails or passwords getting out because I messed up some security thing - the commercial server that Jools pays for is maintained by people who do that sort of thing for a living - I write software, not looking after servers, as my profession).

Unfortunately, having to fix up 10000 user's data so that it's all nicely formatted would require quite a bit of effort, and that would only help a little bit.

--
Mats

[Jools]

Given the finite time we have, I don't think this would be a great move. As I said, this will come with forum integration into other things (tapatalk already has something like this). I guess I'd rather get the fish data right before worrying too much about the people data.

Jools

[bekateen]

... would also require browsers to send data about location as text based location doesn't work. I could implement a country dropdown, but that's not much use for big countries. Because this is an international forum, it also means a global solution is required.

Hi Jools,
Even what you're describing is still much more sophisticated than what I had in mind (to sort a database wouldn't require browsers to send any additional data about the location of the user making the inquiry).

That said, to further your point about the complexity of this, I must confess that I had forgotten a very important detail about how I, and every other member here, provided our location data when we created or edit our profiles, a detail that is very relevant here: On the page where we provide our location, there is only a single field for location, rather than separate fields for (1) Country, (2) State/Province/Republic/etc., and (3) City. As such, my entry (Stockton, CA, USA) is treated as a single string of text, a single long name, that is sorted with every other member's entry, no matter how thorough their entry is.

It's now clear to me why the sort function wouldn't be able to reshuffle the information so easily. Since I didn't remember this detail, I was imagining that the locality data was stored in separate fields, which could be sorted in a nested fashion with not so much effort.

Anyway, thank you Jools, and everyone else, for thinking about the question and chiming in with your perspectives. I really appreciate that.

Cheers!
Eric

P.S., Jools, as far as I'm concerned, while the subject of improving member locality data may not be resolved, the discussion about my question in this thread is resolved, and resolved well (even if not to the outcome I would have hoped for). I consider my question resolved; thank you very much.

[Jools]

It's now clear to me why the sort function wouldn't be able to reshuffle the information so easily. Since I didn't remember this detail, I was imagining that the locality data was stored in separate fields, which could be sorted in a nested fashion with not so much effort.

Anyway, thank you Jools, and everyone else, for thinking about the question and chiming in with your perspectives. I really appreciate that.

Cheers!
Eric

P.S., Jools, as far as I'm concerned, while the subject of improving member locality data may not be resolved, the discussion about my question in this thread is resolved, and resolved well (even if not to the outcome I would have hoped for). I consider my question resolved; thank you very much.

It is good to talk these things over from time to time. The other aspect is that nearly all users are happy to provide their country of residence, many become less comfortable with more detail than that. One for the future and something I will keep a (long range) eye on.

Jools