Autocomplete Location [Deleted]

Thomas.B

Thomas.B

Well-known member

Please note: Post only pre-sale questions in this thread! Post everything else on my website forum. Thank you.​

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Autocomplete Location - Autocomplete for the location field

This add-ons makes it super easy for your members to state their location (city, state or country). Often the right location is already shown on the autocomplete list after the user entered only 3 to 4 letters. The webservice that this add-on uses to search locations has access to almost 3 million names of populated places and to more than 5 million alternate names. Furthermore, if you want to prevent your members to state „nonsense locations“ such as „right behind you“, you can optionally...
Click to expand...

Read more about this resource...
 
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I was too curious and got the addon just now. Installed it and created a Geonames account.
Unfortunately I cannot get the addon working with my own account. I cannot find anything on Geonames to earmark I want to use their webservices.
Is the default account hard coded somewhere?

The Services_Geonames PEAR package is only available for PHP 5.2. According to MattW (my hosting guru) this version is 'ancient and dead'.

The Services_Geonames PEAR package dependancy on PHP 5.2 is something that cannot be fixed, but I would like to use my own Geonames account ;)
 
Other possible bugs in the Location names language.

I use EN for ACP and NL for the forum/frontend.

If I use The User's Language it uses EN. I would expect it to pick up NL.
The same goes for Forum's default language. It uses EN. I also expect it to pick up NL.
 
I decided to give all customers a 33% discount during the first week of the beta test. So the add-on costs now 9.99 instead of 14.99 Euro until next Wednesday. Everyone that has already bought the add-on at the regular price will receive a corresponding discount coupon shortly..
 
This looks like a great start! Would it be possible to limit the locations that are available to select? Our idea has long been to allow users to select only from the nearest major city. The ultimate goal being to allow users to find others near them. If you allow even the smallest towns, as the mod now does, then the locations will be quite fractured. Along those lines, have you considered making the locations a link that returns all users with that location?
 
Excluding locations below a certain population would be technically possible. But I actually don't think that this would be a good idea for various reasons. Firstly, there would be a significant decrease in usability as it could happen quite often that a user would have to make two, three or even four attempts before they find a city in the vicinity that is big enough. Another problem: what is if there are two or more „major cities“ with approx the same distance? Users in the same town could then choose two or three different cities. Also more generally there would be an information loss which should be avoided unless it's explicitly intended.

Now, what I would consider a better solution to your problem would be to introduce a new custom user field that saves the second-level administrative division of a location. In the US that would be a „county“. Would that be sufficient for your case? Adding such a field would be pretty straightforward and there also wouldn't be a drawback for anyone as you could, as with all the other custom fields, simply remove it if you (are sure) you won't need.

insocial said:
Along those lines, have you considered making the locations a link that returns all users with that location?
Click to expand...
Yes, but I think the current Google maps links are also useful and make „semantically“ more sense. Instead I think a separate „user location search“ feature would be better. This is actually going to be my next (standard) add-on :)
 
Thomas.B said:
Excluding locations below a certain population would be technically possible. But I actually don't think that this would be a good idea for various reasons. Firstly, there would be a significant decrease in usability as it could happen quite often that a user would have to make two, three or even four attempts before they find a city in the vicinity that is big enough. Another problem: what is if there are two or more „major cities“ with approx the same distance? Users in the same town could then choose two or three different cities. Also more generally there would be an information loss which should be avoided unless it's explicitly intended.
Click to expand...

I can understand that a user might have to enter a few tries to get a large enough city to work, but the result might be worth it in our case. Much easier to search and sort by location.

If you are getting the geonames data, then I assume you are also getting the latitude/longitude for the city that they choose? If so, then you could add proximity search which would be more powerful that searching by city name.
 
insocial said:
I can understand that a user might have to enter a few tries to get a large enough city to work, but the result might be worth it in our case. Much easier to search and sort by location.
Click to expand...
What about my suggestion with the 2nd admin division?

insocial said:
If you are getting the geonames data, then I assume you are also getting the latitude/longitude for the city that they choose? If so, then you could add proximity search which would be more powerful that searching by city name.
Click to expand...
Yeah, latitude/longitude would be availabe. Could you please explain what exactly you mean with „proximity search“.
 
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