Settings page does not support regions in override home location [closed]

Question

I see that an option has been added to let you add an override setting to let you yourself determine your home location, rather than have an algorithm determine it on the basis of your finds. Admirable.

http://project-gc.com/User/Settings

It seems, however, that there is a discrepancy between what this system knows about which regions are available, and which regions the map filters do. If I go to one of the map tools and choose Denmark as my home country (default, has a button next to it with a flag), I get to pick from one of the 5 regions in Denmark afterwards to narrow my search (and then the same again for county within that region , but that's irrelevant here). If I explicitly pick Denmark in the override drop-down box on the settings page, no options are available in the "Regions" drop-down box.

Its fair enough if the algorithm determines that it does not have sufficient data to conclude which region is my home region (and I am explicitly not opening the discussion on whether it does or not here), but for the override setting, all the regions should be an option. It's not like project-gc does not know which ones are available.

Thank you for a very good website with features of tremendous utility and only minor glitches, one of which is this :)

Answer 1

Home region is only supported for a very few countries, in difference to cache region (and county) which is supported for quite a few more.

I am not sure about the exact numbers, but I believe that the site calculates home region only for the top 10 geocaching countries (most caches active). Denmark isn't included there. If you (just as a test) select home country Germany you will notice that it works.

This is because the algorithm to guess where users live works much better in the countries with a lot of geocaches. We found a breakpoint where we thought it was good enough and kept it to that.

Comments

Yes, that explains perfectly why the algorithm does not hassle a guess as to my home region. That does not, however, explain why the list of regions is empty when Denmark is selected as country in the override setting. I do suppose that the point of having the override is that you yourself choose which region is your home region, regardless of what an algorithm might say (or in this case, not say).

I may be reading too much into your answer, but what I gather from what you are saying is that you have emptied the list of (home) regions for Denmark because you do not want the algorithm to try to guess which one is the correct one.

What I am suggesting is that you let people choose from the actual regions available in a country, regardless of whether you let the algorithm try. That way, people still get to pick a home region :)

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The region box should probably either not exist, or be in a disabled state.

There is no point for you to choose home region since Project-GC will never care about it (as it works today).

The point of the overrides is only for when Project-GC guesses wrong, which is very likely to happen if you have recently moved to another country (or in some cases region).

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That makes sense. If the information regarding which region is the home region of the user is not used at all, it does not make much sense to ask people to specify it - unless it may be used at some future point :)

This makes me curious enough to ask: What does the home region setting do for the (top 10) countries where it is enabled ?

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In most top list you can filter on home country. For those 10ish countries you can also filter on home region.

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Right. Thank you for the answer.

My suggestion is then to add the following to the list of nice-to-haves:
Allow people not in top 10 countries pick their home region manually.

It would be so nice to be able to press a button with the defaults in the filters (the same way that it is possible to do for countries now).

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Right. I think this thread has outlived its purpose. I do not feel strongly enough about this issue to start a seperate feature request thread, so I think I will leave it up to others to do that if they so choose. That should of course not stop you from implementing it regardless :)

Closing thread now.