"Select your area"

#1

There’s a lot of location-specific discussion that goes on here, naturally.

I’ve had a lot of helpful advice given to me that would have been wonderful, had I lived in Taipei.

I thought it might be helpful to both the degree of regional relevancy of answers to posters, as well as in other cases, discussion itself, to have an unambiguous (but optional) location listing (i.e. high-level, e.g. not necessarily region/neighborhood, but at least which major city and something or other for the various boondocks that exist) that can be selected during registration (or edited in profile) and displayed somewhere in the author details in a post, near their username.

It could be as explicit as (Kaohsiung), or if you wanted to save space, even (KHH) (TPE) etc.

#2

i still forget where I was when I signed up for this 3-hour tour, a 3-hour tour

#3

Will look into using a custom field, but I am not sure how it could be made visible on a post. It looks like it could at least be visible on the user’s profile page

Here is how we could make them visible on the user profile page

#4

Most forum softwares have user profile fields that either map to template variables, and/or have configurable options for displaying on posts, like the user titles here for example.

I think a drop-down would be good to have set options.

I don’t think it would serve it’s purpose (not the one I intended anyway - being able to set the context for replies to that user that are based on location, especially in threads that are location-ambiguous And/or which they don’t control the title, like other peoples’) being just hidden in user profiles, since no one will bother to look Or care about updating it if they move

#5

so as gender and nationality, or species, generation too?

#6

Where in the post near the username do you think would work. Some people could use this current field (title) to indicate where they are based, although the most prolific users already use this title to identify themselves

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#7

There is space to the right of the user name, and then there is another space under the user name because the avatar takes two lines of height.

To the right could be better for that custom title that people could fill in as they want, like flairs on Reddit, and then put the location underneath. Or the opposite as appropriate - point being there are 2 possible easy spots and 2 separate fields.

You could make in the profile settings (and visible on registration to encourage people to fill that out) an actual drop-down menu, so as to explicitly limit the number of options available to avoid confusion, and stick to the major cities like Taipei, (Touyan if thats different), Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung, and then however you want to handle all the smaller ones because I’m not sure how those work in terms of being big enough themselves, counting them as metropolitan areas or whether you might want to do counties either for only the less populated areas or altogether like you just changed yours to.

I think there are two kinds of people: people who divide people into two kinds of people, and the rest.

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#8

I’m with you, but this will take some time to implement unless there is a plug-in already made that we can drop in.

Speaking of drop-down, that will also be a more complicated twist since those cities would have to be stored somewhere (and cannot do it on this currently hosted situation)

Let’s also not forget that the placement would differ for mobile users, which I think isnupnto 40% of visits to the website

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#9

I’m glad you Like the idea.

I’m also surprised that discourse is so primitive. I would think there would have to be a plug-in for it if it’s not already default functionality, this kind of stuff has been around since more or less the earliest forum softwares. Or maybe it’s evolution.

There’s still plenty of room in the mobile view, which is the important thing, even if might require some CSS or template customization.

#10

Here is how someone displayed custom field information on each post - under the user avatar

And this one is about multiple choice dropdowns in custom fields, so presumably a simple custom field should be doable, maybe even without a plug-in

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#11

@GooseEgg - case in point, Costco Thread 2019

He’s trying to help me find my pumpkin pie, and despite my saying just a few posts prior I’m in KHH, people don’t have occasion to look back even that much.

A standard display under the avatar of major city/county (I still stay “closest city” and keep it to major ones because that will also let people like me who don’t know all the county names off hand still be able to help people) would make it a lot easier to give relevant location-based advice rather than assuming everybody lives in Taipei, because people would expect that information and know where to look.

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#12

That’s something helpful, if it’s possible to do.
Maybe a badge similar to what the mods use?