Official Geographic communities

[radiantsoul]

Title
Official Geographic communities

Short, concise description of the idea
All new members are automatically subscribed to an official, moderated community that represents their geographic area.

Full description of the ideaThe idea is that there will be several geographic communites; say UK, France, Germany, Russia, etc. These would be moderated

Comments

[diziara]

Totally unrelated to how to handle existing geographic central communities and how to work out the making official, or the competition of creating an "official" version, but I object to the automagical auto-join of new members into communities based upon location.

There are lots of good reasons why people wouldn't want this, and there are lots of good reasons why forcing anything beyond the news community (and paid community for paid members) with new membership is a bad idea. Some people don't care for their geographical location, others create secondary journals to give themselves a way to air their troubles anonymously and lumping them into a geographic based community takes away a layer of anonymity.

A better way to implement this, instead of auto subscribing, perhaps have the communities be suggested to the user? This might work better in a general manner based upon interests, instead of being limited to the geographical locations. Offer up a couple popular communities if the user puts in a popular interest when setting up their profile upon account creation. This might put strain on the servers though, so I'm really offering it more as an alternative idea that could likely make people happy, and possibly lead to other ideas along these lines that are better suited to be implemented.

[danceinacircle]

This I could get behind. I have my own reasons for wanting geographic communities with large numbers of users, and having LJ suggest specific ones would make my job a lot easier. =P

[radiantsoul]

I quite like the auto suggest idea. An LJ newbie community would be interesting too.

Another option I would like would be details of community usage on the community search pages. The problem I have is that as a newbie I join, her about communites, decide I am from the UK and search for UK. I then get 384 communities sorted only by the most recently updated.

[rizzo]

that's not a bad idea at all. you should make your own suggestion. ;)

[charliemc]

Autosuggest good. Autosubscribe bad...

Agreed.

[lassarina]

+1 to suggesting.

I myself spent a long time when I was a wee small thing on the Internets being terrified to even indicate what STATE I lived in (o early days of the Internets, when my parents tried to convince me that everyone online wanted to kidnap me or kill me), and that's something else to consider - people may not be comfortable (especially under-18 folks) admitting what state they live in - or city, for big cities like NYC/LA/Chicago/London/Paris/etc.