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Nanako -> RE: Hello, is anyone there ? (2/13/2011 3:01:31 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SylvereApLeanan
quote:
ORIGINAL: Nanako
The distance thing is a big problem.
See, I don't consider it a problem at all since I don't use it. A much higher priority, IMO, is to implement more search filters. For example, I want an option for relationships so I can filter out people who are married or already owned. I'd also like to be able to filter out people who do drugs or drink heavily like I can on OkCupid.
So which of these options is a higher priority? Which features will benefit the most number of people? And how much time will the coding take? Is the ROI worth the effort? That's what the site owners have to consider. Just because you want the owners to implement certain features doesn't mean it will happen right away. Or at all.
sorry miss, I actually meant that it's a big problem to fix, as in it would definitely take a substantial amount of work, as a comparison to the keyword saving. The other site I pointed to as the solution, gives users a map (of the entire world) powered by google, and allows them to stick a pin in their location. It also allows several levels of precision, so you can stick a pin only in the right country, or zoom all the way in and stick a pin in your house.
However, if you speak priority, I believe that fixing this -in some way- has to be a higher priority than the things you state.
Why?
Because it's not just a missing feature. It's a bug. If you live outside the US, selecting any option for distance other than "any" causes your search to return 0 results. It does the same even if you ARE in the US, unless you've put in a valid zip code. Nowhere on the search page, the account page, or the help page, is this explained.
It doesn't have to be fixed in the manner I described above, but could at least be fixed in some stopgap manner. Like if the user hasn't entered a zip code, attempting to select the option could popup a dialog saying "This feature is only available to residents of the US, who have entered a valid zip code on the My Accounts page"
It would still be exclusionary, but at least it wouldn't be causing user confusion and possibly giving the impression that the site is empty.
With a stopgap solution in place though, I would agree that fixing it properly is a matter of what's important. I can't honestly answer which is most important, the only thing that could would be a general poll of users to find out which features are most desired.
How long have you been waiting for the features you mention, Miss? Has an administrator ever mentioned plans to implement them ?
I will give a simple scenario though. I live in scotland, which is technically a country. However, to the rest of the world, we seem to be treated only as part of the UK, an entity which consists of several other countries. It's a rough guess, but I believe scotland is somewhere between 15-30% of the total land area of the UK, and less than 10% of it's population.
I can't use collarme to search for people in my country. At a base, it searches for people anywhere in the UK. And as you can probably guess from the population values, 90% of those results are going to be outside scotland, and therefore probably too far away. I can't use the distance feature either for obvious reasons, so the only efficient way of finding people in scotland to chat to is either typing Scotland into the keyword search, or typing the name of a major city. I'm not entirely certain but I think CM gives the option to pick only "scotland" as your location, as searching for a specific city brings up entirely different results from searching for the country. This has the problem that unless I search for every city and town, one by one, there are lots of people in marginal areas outside major cities that I'll miss. The only alternative seems to be searching for people in the UK generally, and sorting through the 90% chaff to find people that might be nearby.
It just feels rather clumsy to operate, and very america-focused. Especially compared to the fact that people registering their location as the USA, are invited to farther choose the state that they're in. A built-in, systematic part of the site that makes it easy to find people in your own state.
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