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

[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 entry is the best thing for it, since not everyone's going to agree on where exactly the lines should be drawn, and it's less work to implement it that way.

The second can of worms is, where do you stop? There are so very many different country subdivisions. Should LJ keep track of all of them in a dropdown specific to each country? If not, how do you decide which countries get them, and which don't? How do you decide what the proper level of subdivision is (The United Kingdom highlights this issue; you don't have the same kinds of problems with places like Canada or Australia, for instance.)?

And these political subdivisions are constantly changing. So then you have a choice: either leave the lists horribly outdated, and have people complain about this, or have someone constantly keep track of all of this stuff and spend a huge amount of time updating. And this is a rather low priority. I mean, there are still *countries* out there that haven't been added to the list, so I doubt there's the manpower to keep all of that current.

I guess my general point is, leave it at text entry; it's so much less complicated, and trying to develop something more sophisticated isn't worth the time, effort, or upkeep. Better to have something that works, even if it's inconsistent, but can still be updated, than something that will likely be wrong soon.

[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 :)

[sally_maria]

I completely agree - I think that LJ should include counties as well as states/provinces as the label for the middle box.

That means you could find people who lived in your county regardless of what nationality they considered themselves to be.