Rip out user location map

[iandees]

Inspired by @lxbarth's diary post, this pull request removes the UI elements for viewing/setting a user's home location.

The point here is that the "nearby users" as it is currently implemented is confusing to new users at best. I've heard numerous questions about what it's for at State of the Maps, and it has confused people signing up at my mapping parties.

If we want to keep it we should think about making it more useful and improving the user experience around setting/viewing the data.

[pnorman]

Before removing it, I'd like to see if it becomes useful by restricting the display to users with at least 1 edit. I don't know that it would fix all of the issues, but I think it's a quick fix that should help significantly.

[samanpwbb]

👍 and we can think through a meaningful replacement after its gone.

[lxbarth]

+1 I think it's just fundamentally flawed, even if limited to users with one edit. This map shows people where they live. Which doesn't matter. What matters is where they map. What we should have is a map that makes it easy to discover mappers through their activities anywhere in the world. And yes, I know that's hard to do.

[openstreetmap-website]

What would happen to the existing home locations? With no way to delete /
unset them, users may be concerned about having set something that is
potentially revealing that they cannot unset / change any longer.

So the consequence of this would be that we would need to remove all user
locations from the database.

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Saman Bemel-Benrud <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

[image: 👍] and we can think through a meaningful replacement after its
gone.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/490#issuecomment-25045523
.

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[mvexel]

the above comment is mine, for some reason not identified when I reply by email.

[lxbarth]

So the consequence of this would be that we would need to remove all user locations from the database.

We could show just the city name for a location to the public. Maybe even just capture the location on that level.

[gravitystorm]

I'm opposed to this change. It's the only mechanism by which you can find people in your local area (unlike lxbarth's comment above, knowing where people are is equally as important as knowing where they map, when it comes to building communities). Moreover, it's a great way to find out and build community with those who have registered and not mapped. Perhaps the people in this thread haven't done such outreach, but that shouldn't diminish its value.

The attitude of "thinking about a replacement after it's gone" is also a bad move. If the though process ends up designing something similar, then removing it was a waste. Moreover, without any timeframe we may end up missing this community mechanism for 3, 6, 9, 12 months or longer.

If we propose to replace this with something better, of course that's great. Lets wait until we've got the replacement ready first though.

[tyrasd]

@gravitystorm: +1

[pnorman]

@gravitystorm: 👍

If we want to keep it we should think about making it more useful and improving the user experience around setting/viewing the data.

Should I open a new issue around this or discuss it here?

[iandees]

I put this together because I remembered that asking the user for their location was part of the signup process, potentially confusing the user (it definitely used to -- I wasn't lying about confused users at mapping parties). After going through the process last night, it isn't (signup, confirm email, welcome page, iD is the flow now), so I would tend to agree that this should not be merged.

Let's keep letting users pick their location and move their focus to whatever the new and exciting thing is when that comes out. Otherwise, it's not really harming anything right now.

[tomhughes]

It was never "part of the flow" unless you count the fact that new users were, after confirmation, sent to the settings page with a polite message saying that they might like to fill in their description and home location. If that confused them then I think we're doomed...

[iandees]

The confusion was that they were sent to their settings page and they thought it was where they should map ("how do I make new points on this map?"). They understood quickly when I pointed out it was only for setting their home location, but it was momentarily confusing.

And yes, these weren't the most adept users, but they ended up contributing some useful data...