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Suggestion--Location in FS/Wanted

I;m with Chuck on this. Doesn't have to be a link to their google earth profile, state would be great, even country would be a plus :D

-Lance
 
I must agree also. I think that any new member also include there real email address as part of the registration process. Then the administrators can verify that the user is actually who they say they are. And once confirmed thay can access the forums. How many times has some one registered as a user just to sell an item and then never heard from again. And i'm pretty sure there have been a few scammers who have come in here just to dump some junk they have. Or worse yet take the money and run! :( Sorry if this is long winded but it is just my 2 cents worth.
 
I agree completely. They don't need to post their address, or even their town just the state/country would do.
 
For my part, if someone is looking for something I've got and can't be bothered to say where he/she is located, I usually don't reply. I don't get the paranoia; most folks are using aliases anyway, so what's the harm in posting the city & country?
 
Chromedome45: How many times has some one registered as a user just to sell an item and then never heard from again.
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Actually some of those turn out to be extremely welcome - others perhaps not so.
MikeS: For my part, if someone is looking for something I've got and can't be bothered to say where he/she is located, I usually don't reply.
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I too ignore the ones that hide.
MikeS: I don't get the paranoia; most folks are using aliases anyway, so what's the harm in posting the city & country?
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It is indeed very strange. No one will ever find you in a big city, and if you live in the country, you can't hide anyway.
Like lutiana says, you don't need to get very close to be practical for the purposes here. In the end I suspect that there are just a lot of rude and/or unthinking people around. To me the only practical reason to not give any hints as to even what country you live in would be if you were being pursued by criminals or the police. It seems preposterous and I hope that is not what is happening, but you have to wonder about the ones that don't even give their continent.
 
If you are being pursued by criminals, chances are they are sniffing the 'net. Since VCF is using standard HTTP (non-secure), it would be rather easy to sniff the traffic and at least trace which IP numbers are being used. Those usually are easy to trace to a geographical area unless you're actually using a web proxy to remain anonymous.

On the other hand if Location was a mandatory field, a lot of people would fill in bogus data just to get past it. I've seen numerous examples such as "Earth" or "In your closet" which may appear humorous but quite pointless. In those cases people could just leave the location string empty.
 
carlsson said:
If you are being pursued by criminals...
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Any criminals that were pursuing you would most likely be local to you, and if they were not then knowing your exact address probably would not do them much good (and if it does then chances are they have it all ready). Not to mention if you can snag the IP you can get a geographical location to within a 100 miles.

In summary, the location field cannot hurt you. I do agree that making it mandatory for sign up won't achieve much, but making a rule saying you need to have an accurate location in order to sell things is very reasonable.
 
On another forum I'm participating and moderating on, there is a rule every new poster is required to write a presentation before posting in the trade area. Us moderators over there routinely lock or remove threads due to people not abiding the rules. Some even try to bypass by posting a three line, mostly nonsense presentation.

Fortunately I get a feeling the amount of trade posts on VCF is relatively low, so despite the good web site rankings relatively few try to use the forum as a springboard to eBay or simply a trading place. Perhaps those of us who like new users to appear more devoted to the hobby could start sending PMs with the meaning you have what they look for / want to buy but it all depends on their location. If it is someone who came here to stay for a while, they will get the point.

As a side note, I understand shipping costs depends on state and zip code in the USA, probably within Canada too? A lot of people keep asking about that. Just last week there was a post from someone who wrote he lives in Europe, which to me is just as vague as if not mentioning which state in the USA. As you know, despite the European Union, this continent still consists of a plethora of different countries, all having their own post offices and pricing. Someone selling stuff from within Europe could be living in a high rate country like the UK, Italy, Spain, Norway or Sweden. He could also be a citizen of the Netherlands, Germany or Austria which all have remarkably lower international shipping costs. Plenty of other countries inbetween, so here it is more a matter which is the country of origin than the country of destination. I could afford shipping of a 10 kg computer from Austria but would probably say no to one from Italy.
 
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