SJ77 Posted January 19, 2016 Posted January 19, 2016 Hello Community, With all due respect to the developers, I am not finding the Location field on the profile very useful. It's not a real location field. it's just a basic text field with a label that says "location" As a result input is highly inconsistent. For example I live in California but I could input "CA", "Cali", "Calif", "California", "nor cal", "San Francisco" or even "Lindy for president" Due to the highly inconsistent nature of the field, any use of this field is deeply compromised. Dirty data is hard to work with. The solution Connecting the field with the Google Geolocation API https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/intro would be very helpful. This would allow people to enter into the field anything from a state (as in my example above), a country, a zip code or whatever. A small drop down would pop up and people could then pick their approximate location. The data gets stored in the database as coordinates (latitude and longitude). The output can be controlled for privacy and consistency. For example everyone's profile can simply list country, or country and state. Coordinates are very flexible with regard to output. The API is tested to work anywhere in the world. It has global data. Once the data is clean, many other uses can arise, such as searching for people near by ETC. Any plugin one can think of that would make use of location would be able to function using the default IPB location field. In the current state plugs must create a separate field for location. This is about consistent data collection. Any issues of privacy already exist with the current field. This will only make sure whatever someone enters is usable as opposed to being inconsistent.
mycota Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 https://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/7265-ultimate-location-field/
SJ77 Posted January 20, 2016 Author Posted January 20, 2016 11 minutes ago, mycota said: https://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/7265-ultimate-location-field/ Pretty close but works for PAGES only and not profiles.
SJ77 Posted February 21, 2016 Author Posted February 21, 2016 wow, I just learned that IPB doesn't even have location. The one's people see are apparently due to the upgrade from other framework or older versions. I guess, this thread is moot.
Management Lindy Posted February 22, 2016 Management Posted February 22, 2016 We have profile enhancements in the pipeline this year. I think you will be able to accomplish more along the lines of what you're looking for with that new system. I'm going to mark this not planned, but I suggest you revisit it when we do the complete your profile and enhanced profile additions.
Martin1980 Posted February 22, 2016 Posted February 22, 2016 16 hours ago, Lindy said: We have profile enhancements in the pipeline this year. I think you will be able to accomplish more along the lines of what you're looking for with that new system. I'm going to mark this not planned, but I suggest you revisit it when we do the complete your profile and enhanced profile additions. Any estimated release date for the 4.2 version?
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