User map [Deleted]

[electrogypsy]

I see where you're going with this but it wouldn't work well with IP lookups which are wildly inaccurate. What you want is AGPS lookups which would trigger a browser permission on mobiles. That would be a killer feature.

i personally don't care how accurate IP geolookup is as long as it's within a city radius. we don't need to get all crazy and get down to what block you're on

 

[ichpen]

i personally don't care how accurate IP geolookup is as long as it's within a city radius. we don't need to get all crazy and get down to what block you're on

True but I'd say you don't want a thousand members being notified because they're in the same city which is the case with most larger forums

Not to mention smaller towns will likely get plotted well outside of the town depending on where their ISP has registered the IP blocks.

 

[ichpen]

BTW @CrispinP forgot I didn't buy it and I just did, and fetchapp isn't fetching it for me so if you wouldn't mind...

I won't be installing it just yet as I'm waiting on the navigation features but at least supporting your development.

 

[electrogypsy]

True but I'd say you don't want a thousand members being notified because they're in the same city which is the case with most larger forums

you could easily add options so users could configure their notifications to keep that from happening. the point is that geoip will be good enough for most people in this scenario.

Not to mention smaller towns will likely get plotted well outside of the town depending on where their ISP has registered the IP blocks.

again, we're not looking for pinpoint accuracy, and if you live in a remote area like that, the next town over is basically going to be good enough.

 

[ichpen]

you could easily add options so users could configure their notifications to keep that from happening. the point is that geoip will be good enough for most people in this scenario.



again, we're not looking for pinpoint accuracy, and if you live in a remote area like that, the next town over is basically going to be good enough.

Then how would you configure your notifications to stop notifying you that there's a 1000+ people in your large city yet somehow still be a functional proximity notification? Assuming those thousand come from the same IP block hence would be plotted at exactly the same location which is very very likely. Maybe I'm missing the point here.

 

[Freelancer]

hello user, right now 1000+ users are in your city...

haha...

 

[electrogypsy]

Then how would you configure your notifications to stop notifying you that there's a 1000+ people in your large city yet somehow still be a functional proximity notification? Assuming those thousand come from the same IP block hence would be plotted at exactly the same location which is very very likely. Maybe I'm missing the point here.

yeah, i think you are missing the point. i run two travel websites. our users want to know who is withing X distance of them so they can meet in real life. these people don't care about the other person's EXACT location, they're just interested in knowing if they're near them. for this purpose, geoip would be fine. they can message each other and arrange things from there.

now, neither of my sites have 1000's of users in the same city, but you could simply have a user selectable setting to send you a notification message (conversation) on a set interval of the user's choosing (once a day, week, month, etc). this message would simply say "hello, here is a list of other users in your area, as defined per your settings." with a list of user names linked to their profiles.

in the event of too many users/notifications, the user could simply unsubscribe from notifications entirely.

bonus points if you could restrict the list of users to only those who have been recently active.

see, it's not so difficult once you think about it logically.

 

[Mouth]

our users want to know who is withing X distance of them so they can meet in real life. these people don't care about the other person's EXACT location, they're just interested in knowing if they're near them. for this purpose, geoip would be fine.

FYI, GeoIP is only 80% accurate for US cities to within a 50 mi radius. Once you get outside of the US, then that percentage drops considerably.
I believe you're relying to much on GeoIP and you'll end up annoying your users too much with false positives.
I'm inclined to think a better workflow is to allow a user setting to update location from IP address, then each time the user has an IP address different from previous and they visit the map page, then prompt for confirmation of their location (defaulting to GeoIP) and allowing them to change it, before notifications are sent to users.

 

[electrogypsy]

FYI, GeoIP is only 80% accurate for US cities to within a 50 mi radius. Once you get outside of the US, then that percentage drops considerably.

again, this is well within acceptable limits for my community. if there's a more accurate and/or reasonable way to accomplish this, i'm all ears.

I'm inclined to think a better workflow is to allow a user setting to update location from IP address, then each time the user has an IP address different from previous and they visit the map page, then prompt for confirmation of their location (defaulting to GeoIP) and allowing them to change it, before notifications are sent to users.

the only problem with that is it requires users to visit a specific page, which (IMO) kills the usefulness entirely, since 90% of people aren't going to do that. 100% of of your community members are going to login though, so might as well take the IP data from that.

 

[CrispinP]

I don't think that the geolocation for IP addresses is that bad. Certainly not from Google. Someone like IPLocaiton.net know my home IP down to my postal town which is pretty small. They don't say it's the big-city-next-to-the-town.

I have a few other ideas I can do which might answer a few of the questions here. I'll put them in first and then get your thoughts

Last night was spent fixing my dev server Over the weekend I thought I would make a quick change. Well, that went badly
Think I'm back up and running now so might be able to do the nav changes tonight / tomorrow.
When that is done then I can play with the geo stuff.

Thanks for the feedback though - enjoy the debates.

C

 

[Freelancer]

able to do the nav changes tonight / tomorrow.

 

[CrispinP]

CrispinP updated User map with a new update entry:

Navigation tab added, Ignore SSL certificates

[Updates]

• You can now have your own navigation tab on the main menu.
• You can ignore SSL certificate errors with the APIs.

[Features]

Where do you want to display the menu?
View attachment 137547

Options:

• Nowhere
• Middle
• Home
• End

Home = inserted between the HOME Tab and FORUM Tab.
Middle = inserted between the FORUM tab and MEMBERS tab
End = inserted after the MEMBERS Tab

As always, demo available here:...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[CrispinP]

I think I might have introduced a bug in this version. Please hold off installing it just yet. Will update asap.

 

[CrispinP]

CrispinP updated User map with a new update entry:

Permissions check

Small fix to 2.5 - this now does the permissions check correctly.

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[ichpen]

yeah, i think you are missing the point. i run two travel websites. our users want to know who is withing X distance of them so they can meet in real life. these people don't care about the other person's EXACT location, they're just interested in knowing if they're near them. for this purpose, geoip would be fine. they can message each other and arrange things from there.

now, neither of my sites have 1000's of users in the same city, but you could simply have a user selectable setting to send you a notification message (conversation) on a set interval of the user's choosing (once a day, week, month, etc). this message would simply say "hello, here is a list of other users in your area, as defined per your settings." with a list of user names linked to their profiles.

in the event of too many users/notifications, the user could simply unsubscribe from notifications entirely.

bonus points if you could restrict the list of users to only those who have been recently active.

see, it's not so difficult once you think about it logically.

OK, so I think I sort of get your use case somewhat though I'm not sure how useful a conversation with thousands of usernames will be to anyone. Perhaps a more generic implementation would be a button on the members map page to generate a popup with a list of users near you or even an expansion of the current filter (view all, view online) to allow for distance (view within x kms/miles).

The notification part (via PC) is probably not too generic but who am I to say.

 

[ichpen]

5, 20, 50 .. doesn't seem any number I put within Cluster Size makes it friendly. Example ....

View attachment 137329
View attachment 137328

Seeing same issue. @CrispinP I think there's a zoom option you can pass to the cluster js script which you may want to expose via the ACP, it 'should' give you ability to tell it at which max zoom level it should cluster.

 

[ichpen]

More feature requests as I'm starting to use this today:

Add opt-in checkbox to user profile under Map Location field and registration page to allow board to locate you via IP, default is disabled. A phrased description msg would be good so we can explain in detail. Checking enabled and saving profile would automagically do IP lookup ONLY and ignore Map Location and Location fields.

 

[CrispinP]

Seeing same issue. @CrispinP I think there's a zoom option you can pass to the cluster js script which you may want to expose via the ACP, it 'should' give you ability to tell it at which max zoom level it should cluster.

I'll take a look for the setting you're talking about. If it's there then I'll expose it.
I have just finished another version which works really well. In ACP you can set a radius and it plots duplicate points randomly within the radius.
An example was I set everyone to London which defaults decodes to the same spot (Nelson). Normally you would get a straight line like @Mouth shows but you now get a cluster of pins dotted around a 500m (ACP default) radius.
I'll drop that out soon.

Add opt-in checkbox to user profile under Map Location field and registration page to allow board to locate you via IP, default is disabled. A phrased description msg would be good so we can explain in detail. Checking enabled and saving profile would automagically do IP lookup ONLY and ignore Map Location and Location fields.

This can also be done.

 

[Pauly]

Just installed this feature, API keys in & it is working well, one question though, I have created a new member and set location but they do not appear on the map, running massupdate fixes this but does mass update need to be run everytime to allow members to be seen or will they appear in time, I understand there is no cron entry to do this obviously but doesn't seem logical for repeated mass API calls ?
ps I have map only showing to members that have location set so they have the option to use/be seen or not

 

[CrispinP]

Any user should save the location when it updates assuming the api call works and the location can be decoded.

What was the location?