Just a thought, a google map of member locations

[John S]

We run a completely free advert site for home shop machinists.

Advert - All Ads

If you place an advert for sales or wanted you have to give the first part of your post code, in my case NG10.
This is to save wasting peoples time contacting someone, only to find they are in the opposite end of the country.

No one sees the last part of the post code, only the person you give it to at the completion of a sale.

[Swarfing]

Can only see that being a problem if an actual address were used but would have thought it would be alright if just done by town much the same as the info on each post.

You would be mad to give your address out! Town is fine.

[martin54]

You would be mad to give your address out! Town is fine.

That's the point I was making the other site you mentioned must have had a lot more detail than what town the members were in if a number of them got broken into.

[Lee Roberts]

Hi lee, just a thought here, but do you think it would be a good idea to incorporate a map of all the members?

What I mean i mean is you have something like a google map view of members of the forums and the town they are from. This could help bring more people together and be quite interesting if you find out you have guys near you that could help etc.

I've seen it on joescnc and it's quite interesting to see that their is few hybrid builders from his forum here in the UK

just a though..

Hi guys,

Thanks for the suggestion, some one has already suggested this to me in the past, at the time i looked at something the guy over at digitalpoint developed, the link for what it is now is here: GEO Visitor Tools, i cant remember now why i didnt implement something or even the link above.

IF i was to code something up to do what your suggesting D-Man i would do it so it pulls in the voluntary profile field that we have at the momment called "Location:" and then plots it like you suggest to a google map. At the momment i would probably suggest that i wont have time to work on this so it wont happen, unless some one can find a system already coded up that i can just implement after some review.

D.C. how's that tin foil cap of yours doing, as nobody mentioned anything about IP addresses....

That's the point I was making the other site you mentioned must have had a lot more detail than what town the members were in if a number of them got broken into.

"You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth - Meat Loaf"

.Me

[D-man]

Me four :-)

[D-man]

Mmmmm beer! :-)

[Swarfing]

Mixed with a huge group hug........and then more beer!

[martin54]

Mixed with a huge group hug........and then more beer!

Count me out if group hugs are involved but I'm happy to go along for the beer.

[Lee Roberts]

Hi guys,

I’ve giving this a little more thought today and come up with an idea!

Let’s move on from the technical aspects of this (thanks for staying level headed about it so far) and look at how we can move forward, from what I can see the only real reason for having a User/Member Map, is to see who is in your local area and maybe this information could be used to arrange meet ups and possibly some sort of workshop.

So how can I help facilitate this.

How about if we set up internal community groups, the forum software has this feature built in, its just turned off at the moment because I couldn’t see any need for it previously. I need to go over the settings and so on but that shouldn’t take long, I think it would allow for individual group sections, individual group pages, a group logo for each group and possibly internal group messages.

The way this could work is we could title each group based on counties, so if like me you live in the Lancashire County, this would be the group you join or receive an invite request from. This then brings me on to say, we could have a group leader/admin for each group responsible for the obvious things, it would require group leaders to send out invites to begin with and do the promotion side of things, I will look at how I can drive members to groups once up and running and so on.

Will stop there and put it out to you, think it would work well and wouldn’t require anyone to disclose any critical location details, group admin could take care of any arrangements and then post a message to the group giving the details for the meet ups and so on.

For logo’s I thought it would be cool to use the coat of arms for each county.

.Me

[martin54]

Would you really need someone to oversee each group Lee? Reason I ask that is because I know how difficult it can be to get someone to actually do it lol.
Other problem is that some people are going to live close to boundaries so may want to meet up with more than one lot of people.
Idea sounds ok & people could just keep an eye on the area's they wanted to & people could post to see if anyone wanted to meet up.