More Country specific Member directory sections

[martinhazel]

Title
More Country specific Member directory sections

Short, concise description of the idea
Allowing better drill down searching for users

Full description of the ideaIn the USA section you can drill down to specific states for users and communities, but you can't do the same in the UK or many other countries, I for one as a paying user would love

Comments

[burr86]

http://www.livejournal.com/directorysearch.bml -- like that?

[dandelion]

In the UK, we don't have states or provinces, so people aren't all using that field in the same way - people put town, county or even country there. I think searching on, for example, York, blank, United Kingdom gets different results to blank, York, United Kingdom, York, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom or York, England, United Kingdom. (I am assuming the blank versions are all possible, but I can't actually do the search). It would even be nice to say whether we're in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, because currently the only way to do it is as if it were a state, and that means there's only one field left which needs to fit in both county and town. I have my county in the City field, which is obviously incorrect, but it's because I specified I'm in England.

[dandelion]

Also, I would say that specifying county if the user is in the UK is roughly as important as a US user being able to specify a state - for a start, there are more people in my county (Essex) than there are in 12 US states as well as the District of Columbia, and we're not the biggest county. It seems fairly straightforward to me to add different fields to the userinfo if the user says they're from the UK (England/Wales/Scotland/NI dropdown, then county and town/city). Or, ditch the strange UK option and add the four parts of the UK to the country dropdown, because people rarely ever say they're from the UK; they identify with a specific country in it. Then county can be specified in the state/province bit, because they're sort of similar and the search will then be more straightforward.

[sally_maria]

I agree that county should be in the same box as state/province, but I disagree about removing UK from the drop-down list.

For one thing, the vast majority of web-sites use UK and I can see a lot of confused British users wondering where their country has disappeared to.

Secondly, I can't speak for anyone else but as far as I'm concerned, I'm British. England is just another geographical expression, like the counties. The idea of separating out parts of a single country is just going to open a big political/cultural can of worms and really don't think LJ ought to go there.

[dandelion]

I find that web forms seem to be split between having United Kingdom or its constituent parts. I've also seen Great Britain; there isn't really a consensus.

Also, I've never really seen myself as British. For pretty much no intents and purposes am I British - I don't have a British passport, and when I go to university I am an English student applying to study in England and Wales (Welsh students in Wales get extra funding). The four parts seem far too different for me to say I've got some sort of affiliation with all of them.

[sally_maria]

Really? I can't remember seeing a web form with anything other than UK - though obviously your experience is different.

I do wonder if it's the result of the new generation growing up with devolution - I suspect I'm something like 15 years older than you, and to me the cultural and historical ties that bind the United Kingdom are much stronger than the things that divide us.

In any case, we're getting way off topic. I'd just argue that if LJ starts listing the four nations separately, where do they stop? Separate selections for Catalonia, the Basque country, Montreal, Cornwall? Drawing the line at independent nation states is at least a logically consistent position, even if it does lead to the odd anomaly.

[martinhazel]

Even the mighty (ahem) Microsoft list counties, and provinces,its got nothing to do with devolution its more about finding people, if you are looking for someone you know, and you know where they live, its a lot easier to search by county than a whole country, there is a massive difference between a few million users and a mere 10,000 if you see where I am going here. I dont want towns listed, just counties!

[sally_maria]

Sorry, as I said, I was getting off topic - I just meant devolution was the cause of people thinking of themselves as English, Welsh etc. instead of, rather than as well as, British.

For the record - I agree you should be able to search by county. The current search does allow for that - but because the box is labelled state/province rather than county, not everyone is using it correctly.

What I
don't want is for LJ to drop United Kingdom from the country box in favour of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, which is what dandelion was suggesting.

[ruakh]

If the countries are given as "UK - England", "UK - Northern Ireland", "UK - Other/Unspecified", "UK - Scotland", and "UK - Wales" (though maybe not in that order; I just went alphabetically), I don't think any Briton would wonder where the UK was in the list.

(That's not to say it's a good idea, just that there are non-confusing ways to do it.)

[sally_maria]

That's true - as you say that would be much less confusing than dropping UK altogether. I would still have problems with it, but they'd be cultural ones not usage ones. :-)

[martinhazel]

In reply to your second comment: We are all British I don't think there is any cultural can of worms that can be opened just look at the community lj-uk everyone gets on fine there

[jai_dit]

In my opinion, there are in fact two cans of worms here: the first is splitting the UK up. LJ currently has 3 subdivisions, like other people have said. The country level, the state level, and the city level. So what goes where? Short of reworking the way countries and eveyrthing are stored and used site-wide (which would be way more trouble than it's worth), you have to make a decision. So do you break UK into 4 (or more) countries? Do you leave UK as one country, but make England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and whatever other posessions, crown territories, what have you as selectors in a dropdown for "states" that hasn't even been created yet? Or do you make it a drop down for counties? Do you use traditional counties? ceremonial counties? metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas? Where do Regions of England fit in? Counties or Districts for Northern Ireland? What happens at the next administrative reform, when all the lines get redrawn differently? You get the idea. I think that even though it's not really standardized, text

[sally_maria]

I agree - I think the present system is fine - though maybe adding county to state and province to describe the second box might help to standardise responses.

[azurelunatic]

I could actually see usably adding another level of location to the whole location thing, including the US, like so:

country > state/province > county/district/etc. > town/city > zip/postal code.

Of course, that's on the front end only; I have no idea how much stuff would have to get changed to accomodate that. gameboyguy13 has a better idea of that from his experience in schools, and he said there was a lot depending on location not being changed much.

[sally_maria]

I think this is where you get into politics again. :-) I've always considered British counties to be the equivalent of state/province - the next geographical/administrative division down from the national government. And that's true, in England. In Scotland and Wales these days, though, they have another level of government.

I could live with your solution, but it would have to be labelled properly to avoid confusing all the other Brits who wouldn't consider including England (or other nation) in their on-line address, any more than they would in a postal one.

[martinhazel]

What I was trying to explain is the fact that I just want Counties included, I obviously care weather people think they are English/Irish/welsh or Scottish, but I think it has little use in trying to find ones friends. I don't think its about government at all and would sooner see anything relating to politics kept out of it :)