To All: Please add some sort of location to your description. It's really helpful for many topics. If you are worried about privacy, simply put "northern USA" or "Japan" or something like that. All too often we forget this is indeed the World Wide Web. There are so many things relevant to location like your climate, traffic conditions, fuel prices, Prius variant (Euro/ Asia whatever), Cellular providers, Navigation function, emmisions, (need I go on?). AdminCoop (Danny), can you make location mandatory for profiles of future members? Perhaps a descriptor indicating that a general location is fine for those who are concerned about privacy can be included by that box. City and State (Country) is ideal, but anything is helpful, even "USA." Nate
I agree that it is definitely helpful to have Location part of your profile and the PC staff urges you to make it a part of yours. I'm interested to hear what the member's thoughts are about making it a required field vs privacy. And I changed my username - get it right!! :lol: Actually, PriusChat 2.0 (currently in Beta stages) will have a search function within the membership list so that you can search by location or any other field in the user profile.
I don't see a problem if folks can put as much or little detail as they like. I remember when I did mine I first put in "SF Bay Area" until I had time to think about whether being more specific than that would be a problem ... later went back and changed it to "Berkeley, CA". People can always just go for a state or country ...
Yes, at least state. So many folks have questions about taxes or gas prices or dealerships. Many of the answers can depend on where you live and it's great to be able to help out that much quicker instead of having to ask or giving provisional answers. But I completely understand if some folks don't want to give too much information. State or in some cases area (like CA Bay Area) is reasonably anonymous.
I think if you make it "mandatory" then people who normally would not have filled this part in, due to personal security reasons, would just put anything and would not be honest. If it remained "optional" then people may place it in or just state in their post where they are located when discussing something that may be geographically sensitive. The people who are concerned about sercuirty probably wouldn't even enter these conversations so I feel that "mandatory" is a bit extreme.
agreed! mandatory will turn off folks you don't want to turn off, but people that are so into anonymity as to hide their city, state or country, .... well, they reduce the value of their own postings if what they're saying only has to do with their locale, and we don't know where "there" is!
You can't force people to give an honest answer, so mandatory would encourage false answers, and we'd have less information rather than more. But I do think you ought to encourage people to give a location, being as general or specific as they are comfortable with, and point out to them that this information is helpful to all users of the forum.
Danny, maybe you could put a little bit of explanation text in there next to the location field to tell the users that it's helpful to include at least their state.
