[OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations

Matt Amos zerebubuth at gmail.com
Sun May 31 12:00:45 BST 2009


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
> Joe Richards wrote:
>> How about a set of contact preferences?  It would be easy to say "allow other OSMers to contact me for mapping parties" etc.  Perhaps for old users this could be set to "on" by default, but we send them a little message so that they can change it straight away if they want to.
>
> That's basically unenforceable though - we have no way of knowing what a
> message is about when somebody sends it.

if we want to keep the map on the users' pages showing the nearest
other users to them, we might as well offer this data publicly. as
russ said, it's one script and a bunch of server load away from being
public anyway.

in my opinion it's evil to contact users who haven't opted in to be
contacted. it's a valid point of view that they implicitly opted in,
but i don't think this is what most users intended when they added a
home location - it's certainly not what i intended.

i like jochen's idea of being able to additionally put in a bbox (or
maybe several) that are "areas of interest - please contact me about
OSM activities in this area". we could then make the users' home
locations private, but show a map of which users are interested in
areas near your home location. of course, a simple "notify me about
OSM activites in my area" checkbox could make it very easy to create a
bbox centred on your home location.

this could also start allowing 3rd party sites to easily offer a
"follow changes in my areas of interest" feature, which has been often
requested.

cheers,

matt




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