Location... and Member List.

[Peter van Es]

At the request of a number of members, I have made the Location field more accessible in the Member list. If you go to the Member List (the Members tab at the top) it will now show the location of that member. You can sort on the Location field, and you can do selections (Go to Search for members... e.g. enter Australia, select the tick box for Search by Location and presto... off you go).

I hope that this makes this functionality more useful to you all. However, it does require you to add a Location field (that's sensible) to your Profile. Go to the Profile tab, Select Forum Profile Information, and enter sensible information for Location.  I recommend adding City, State and Country.

Do note that if you update or modify your Full Membership information (where these details are compulsory) it will automatically fill your Location field also. If you do not like the way that is formatted, you can change the Location field afterwards without affecting your (private) postal address.

Peter

[Richard Madison]

Peter:

Thanks for giving us Location. Now we can find other car owners in our area.

The Location column sort feature will be a little rough unless we have a standard way to enter Location. If one entry is "Chicago, IL, USA" and the other is "USA, Chicago Il" they will not be near each other in the column sort.

A standard entry order for Location will allow for a more useful sort. I was thinking the format  "USA, IL, Chicago" will allow a correct sort by Country, then State, then City making it easier to find members in the USA or in IL (Illinois) or in Chicago...and a similar scheme for other countries will also help the sort.

As I have some spare time, I may try editing the Location entires into a standard format to make the Location feature even more useful. In the Car Registry, we adopted a standard format for the VIN number column. You can now sort the VIN column and find cars near your VIN number.

The Location feature will not be very useful unless more Forum Members add Location to the profile. Don't worry about entry order, just add your Country, State/Province, City.

Richard M, Moderator

 

[Peter van Es]

Before you go around changing all locations, I'll need to modify my code a little.... the code that fills the location from the Full Membership details... and I can write a query to fill it in that order for the full members. Otherwise your work would be for nothing. However, I'm not sure you have access to the location field... I don't think you can change it.

Actually, when thinking about it... do a search for Location, and enter a name: "New York",... then a state (MA or country)... (but click the username or e-mail checkboxes away). It will show up all members if they have that value in the field... it does not matter if it's in the beginning or the end. So with Search you can do what with Sorting takes a lot of effort.

So I would not bother to do what you propose to do... you'd have to police it for new members in future as well.

Let me know if you still want to go ahead, cause then I'll modify my code and do a quiry on the entire database.

Peter

[hauser]

Richard, I looked at the Car Registry section on the Home Page and found that the cars listed were in no particular order.  Is there a different list somewhere?

[Richard Madison]

I looked at the Car Registry section on the Home Page and found that the cars listed were in no particular order.

The Car Registry has sortable columns. Sort on the VIN number column and the page will reload in VIN number order making it easier to find the VIN near yours, for example. (Sort by clicking the top of the column).

Also useful is the Year/Model column. Sort on this to find cars listed by year.

Regretfully the other columns including Member's names and Colors will not sort correctly since the entries are not in standard format.

Someday, we may get the colors in a standard format to allow a sort to find all Lipstick Red cars but for now since colors are listed by codes, by informal names, etc. sorting is not too useful.

Try sorting on either the VIN column or the Year/Model column to see if the Registry becomes more useful to you.

Richard M, Moderator (and Car Registrar)

 P.S. We need more cars in the Registry. Please click on the Registrar link at the top of the Car Registry page and send us the info about your car.

[Richard Madison]

Peter:

I just wanted a way to allow all forum members others in a country or in a state/province or in a city. If a Search will do that, then we don't need to mess with the code.

Richard M, NYC 

[Peter van Es]

I think that if people enter their city, state and country, a Search will turn them up. Again, standardisation (USA or United States of America) would help but is hard to enforce.

Peter

[hands_aus]

Hi Peter,

Could the 'country, state, city' entries be made compulsory information on the registration process or is that too demanding of members?
Will making that request stop people from joining or re-joining the group?

[Peter van Es]

Bob,

that would require another software change. I'll look into it.

Peter