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Elegant
- Topics: 3
- Replies: 11
- Total Posts: 14
App Check-in 🔥 So happy we are making this work!
LiaDelSol
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- Replies: 1
- Total Posts: 1
I would like to test it
Pchelovod
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- Replies: 3
- Total Posts: 3
Used the app at least a bit for over two weeks. With the exception of no direct access to the forums, it did mirror the look and feel of the website very accurately.
I emailed you once in the first week to note a problem– when switching back and forth among the navigation buttons at the bottom, especially if I quickly changed my mind and selected a different button, the app sometimes appeared to get “stuck.” For instance, today, I was still seeing the window content for the “Home” screen, despite the “Messages” button being selected. And sometimes I’ve needed to close the app and re-open it to get unstuck.
I appreciate your doing this app, especially given your budget constraints. If you ever add features, and it doesn’t cost a fortune, a map-based search would be nice– select a location (or postal code) and a search radius. But that is not critical right now– I can view all matching users in my state on just two pages. You’re correct that the big hurdle now is to get more new users with completed profiles!.
Thank you again.
Administrator
- Topics: 130
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- Total Posts: 186
In reply to Pchelovod: Thank you for raising the issue of a map-based search. This usual way smartphones do this is by reading your exact GPS location and storing an approximation to it. We could do this, but I thought people might not like it due to privacy concerns i.e. your phone is transmitting your exact location over the Internet. Although it would be encrypted of course. Maybe people could voice their thoughts on this matter here.
Our main search page (not the Quick Search) allows you to search on city names. This won’t tell you if someone is in a neighbouring city. You could ask ChatGPT to list all the towns and cities in a 20km radius from your city. With this information you can perform a series of searches for each town and city. Five to ten individual searches won’t take that long and will give you a good approximation to what you want.
Our site subdivides countries into regions (states or provinces). In large countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia, a region based search won’t help much. Searching on regions (leaving the city name blank) is much more useful for smaller European countries. Some of them are divided up into lots of different regions. For example, Germany is divided up into the following regions.
Baden-Württemberg Region
Bayern
Brandenburg
Bremen
Hamburg
Hessen
Berlin
Mecklenburg-vorpommern
Nordrhein-Westfalen
Rheinland-Pfalz
Saarland
Sachsen
Sachsen-anhalt
Schleswig-Holstein
Thüringen
NiedersachsenIn English, Bayern is known as Bavaria. It is a good idea for people to enter their European city names in their native language rather than English when registering here. Otherwise city-based searches will fail if half the city names are in English and half or not. My Account (Settings) allows your location to be updated after registration.
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I agree, allowing location access to the app is not desirable. I care a lot about privacy and tracking.
But if users could have the option to click on a map to specify their location when registering or updating their profile, and those locations could be displayed on a search map (for example anything within 100 km from a chosen point) that would make searches more useful and easier to perform. (The classified advertising site, Craigslist, in the US has a search feature roughly like this.)
I live in a small US state, so I need to search in 3 or 4 different states to find all users within a search radius of roughly 100 km. And then I get many who are too far away. It would be a nice to have this feature, but no doubt would cost money to add it. A tough decision with a limited budget.
Thank you for the site and for the app.
- Topics: 130
- Replies: 56
- Total Posts: 186
In reply to Pchelovod: Thanks for the suggestion. It is a very good idea to give people the option to provide an approximate location by putting a pin on map.
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