In this post something another poster said made me think about a good thing to maybe set up for the board, a member map. It would be like Arnold’s photo gallery, ie on a totally voluntary basis and serve as a emans of member identification - you could go there if you can’t remember where a poster is from (and it either doesn’t show because they’re not a paid member or they have something cryptic for location) so you can keep that in mind for your replies (like Diogenes could have used when replying to jayjay upthread) and, if you want to pick a particular user’s brains about something based on their location (like “Oh, I see UserX lives in Haiti, I wonder if he’s all right after the quake?” or “Oh, I see UserY lives in Nigeria, I wonder if they get 419 scams like the rest of us?”) it would make it easier.
Again, as I said, it would be completely voluntary like Arnold’s gallery so it wouldn’t take away from those who deliberately don’t want to be found …
Just an idea, but it should be easy to implement, I’ve seen other places that have member maps (and I’ve even heard of one board that uses it to help counter board spam (“hmmm, this new member put a German location on the map, but he has a Japanese IP address. Better watch this one carefully.”)
I’m aware of at least two such projects in the past, put together by interested posters. However, I am not aware of anyone who has tried to do this recently.
How would this be any different than checking the poster’s member page? If they don’t want to put a location there, I think it unlikely they would participate in a map program.
Sorry, that’s the standard reply in my household if anybody asks “Do you know what I need?”
Seriously though, I have participated in those kinds of maps at a few forums over the years, but frankly once having done so, never ever looked at the things again. And I don’t recall anyone ever talking about them again after the original post fades away, so I think there is a tendency for them to be started and then more or less abandoned.
This. As Colibri mentioned, this has been done at least twice that I know of and both faded quickly.
And looking through my SDMB links, I find I have forgotten a few attempts. We have had a Google map, a Frappr map, a map on Teeming Millions, and a couple, Find a Doper! and Dopers of the World Unite!, that now give a 404 error.
If enough people are really interested in this, I could try to manage it and incoporate it somehow into the picture gallery, i.e. if you provide a map location then there would be a link to the SDMB Google Map from your photo gallery page.
But I’m not sure there is really a need for this seeing as how we have a location field available in our profiles.
Locations in profiles are helpful if you want to look up the location of an individual. However, if you want to find out if there are Dopers from your hometown or in the country you’re planning to visit, going through profiles is an awfully tedious way to glean that info.
I was about to post my favorite bar joke… but then I realized I might get a few people mad at me for it… damn trying not to insult people I don’t know!
