where are the V1E users from? I was wondering if someone has already made a world map and points for places with V1E machines and users? If not, I think I’d like to do it.
It’s been discussed but I don’t believe anyone has done it. See this thread.
There was a thread years ago where people told a little about themselves and where they are from. Many newcomers here since then, perhaps time for a new one?
Members can disclose their location in their profile, and you can see that when clicking on their name. I know that’s not the most convenient way to find out but at least it is available. Here’s a screenshot of mine.
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. That’s a single point in the Caribbean islands
I’ll have to rethink this after reading this other post. I was wondering if I could share some document where anyone who wants to can provide the location. No name needed. I was also thinking more of a manual map, not a virtual one. Like some dxf that people can use if they want. it would be just wow to see how worldwide this is.
I am in, we have looked into it several times but there seems to be tons of hurdles to get it right.
Man all the smart software/web devs we have on here and no one has made a site that’s just a map that you can pin your location on? LOL. As I sit here making it sound super simple yet not having a single clue of where to start with something like that. I am DEFENITLY NOT one of the smart software/web devs LOL
Not THAT hard……if you got somewhere to host it……
I was thinking about it last time this thread came up, then kinda forgot about it.
It would be hard to have accurate counts, but you could have a pin in each zip code/city/region where at least one machine exists, and maybe just have types of machines the pins represent
Could scrape past orders for high level information without breaking anyone’s privacy, but as soon as you open it up, you’d start getting duplicates from the forums, so you’d have to just have a marker for if one exists, rather than the number.
So people could mark if they have a machine and what type in a region that isn’t represented yet, and then you’d have no way to know when to remove them….
So it would be more of a map of “Here’s all the places a machine has existed before, but not necessarily still existing”
Agreed.
The hardest part here is having a good dataset. What you want to get out of this defines what the dataset should contain. Just knowing that users exist in certain states/countries/regions is probably the most basic. Ideally, it would be cool if we had it mapped down to a city level, specifying which machines they have, whether they are in-progress/complete/retired along with the forum username. It would be cool to be able to message someone on the forum to coordinate a meetup if they were close to you. I wouldn’t want this data to have my full street address. This is the internet after all.
If we have the city information, we can use something like the Google Maps API to translate that to GPS coordinates to show on a map. At least I did something like that a long time ago.
Does Is it possible to add fields to a user’s profile on the forum to gather this data? This is assuming that Discourse has an API we can use to retrieve this data. I don’t know if there are any GDPR concerns here.
Edit:
Yes, you can add custom fields.
Create and configure custom user fields - Documentation / Site Management - Discourse Meta
Yes, there’s an API. Not certain if custom fields are returned.
Discourse API Docs
The biggest problem now is we can’t use any order data because no one agreed to that when they submitted it. Best to just have it user input. At that point, how do you keep bots out?
I’m not a lawyer, but if you are only saying “I know someone in this city has built a lowrider “ without any identifying information, is that really an issue?
Have to have a forum login and at some basic user level so we know its a bot or not. They usually get flagged pretty quick around here.
I don’t think Discourse can work as an OpenID provider, but you could maybe get a decent amount by not allowing individual accounts, and only allow 3rd party providers like google, just to make it slightly harder, but as long as there isn’t anything to gain, they probably will stay out anyway.
If there’s no way to scam or financially gain, then you just gotta deal with anyone else who is bored enough to make accounts and register fake machines
I prefer to play it safe.
It’s no different than randomly telling someone “I was packing an order to ship to Houston yesterday……”
There’s no implied confidentiality being broken.
True
Some cities are very small, and some are islands. I am not sure how to go about it but it feels a bit weird using that info. I would much prefer users just submit as much info as they prefer. It is a bummer because we lose all the previous 9 years, but I don’t feel right using that info…if I can even go back that far.
Is this not a function of Google Maps maybe?
There are plenty of ways to display the data.
Google maps, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS, etc.
That’s no problem at all.
It’s all the stuff around that map that has to be built