Geolocation feature

Hello,

I have just found a similar topic ‘Add users to regions in community based on geolocations’ and realized it as a very cool feature. I would like to have such feature in Discourse, please vote it :wink:. Let me share my thoughts, it may look fantastic, but who knows…

Let us imagine that many people are members of a communities located on a single big forum like meta.discourse.org.

I propose to use Discourse as a user-quick-response platform to have a fast answer to users’ personal questions. Of course, as an administrator, I can divide my forum into hundreds of themes to collaborate people using their preferences and interests.

But now there is no any dynamic automatic division based on some important user’s state. When I travel, for example, I would like to be automatically joined to groups of a community located anywhere around the world.

For example, I am a Writer, or Java developer, or a Scuba diver, or a Biker, or a Woodworker, whatever… and I want to meet classmates/potential friends, who have the same hobbies like mine, take part in some special events or simply spend my time great! At any location where I could travel.

I understand, that there are a lot of special forums where I could join before my trip, and find some information. But it is difficult to find fast exactly what I want, especially in the absence of time.

The main idea is: people already joined into community wait for new active members in a background, and new members come in(out) to(from) community dynamically. This solves the problem of classic forums:

  1. most users register to forums only for 1-2 posts
  2. many forum members lose their interest soon after join
  3. few active members at the same time - many small forums die soon after creation
  4. new members get answers not in a time, and as a result - forums have a plenty of garbage.

Like an RSS, I want to receive any updates on active topics based on my hobby or interest in any city I stay. It is extremely important to support active people who travels. To achieve this, the option of current geolocation should be supported in Discourse.

At the end, it won’t be necessary to spend the time for searching special local websites of professional communities. Discourse will prevent to create similar or duplicate communities at the same location through exact tags and categories. Using web browser/device geolocation and based on user’s user hobbies (tags, forum preferences), the user will be joined to certain communities automatically: for example, Istanbul Scuba divers team, Pakistan Woodworkers, Angola Extreme Bikers or Bermudas Java Developers.

What do you think, is it possible to develop this feature inside Discourse? This cannot be implemented in any social network because they are overloaded by other features. Discourse should be stay fast and smart simultaneously for years!

-Ivan

Some tangentially related ideas were discussed here: Visual map of users and here: GEO Tagging ability for topics.

Geolocation is a fun feature, but we’re unlikely to ever do any work with it until it becomes useful for our customers. In the meantime a plugin is your best bet.

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Is it possible to easily modify this plugin to display the US State icon instead of the country?

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