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.

Agree

[ankhorite]

+ 1

[7rin]

Yes, counties should be included somewhere as well as/instead of state - I *really* like hakeber's suggestion of the line used intuitively changing from state, to county, or province, or whatever other name gets used for these divisions.

As for the whole UK vs. everything else drama; I'm in the UK, yes, but I'm in a SPECIFIC *COUNTRY* in the UK (which just happens to be England, but were I someone else, I could be in Wales, Scotland, etc.). A country is NOT a 'just' a state, it's an entirely different nation, with different cultures, etc. Heck, even within the divisions of coutries there're different cultures I know, but could you imagine the outcry if - just because it's all on (more or less) the same landmass - all the countries in Europe were just given the designation of Europe, instead of France, spain, etc. England is the COUNTRY I am in, the UK is the STATE I am in, they are NOT the same things, and I would much rather be able to say I'm in England instead of 'just' being in the UK.