Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 5052306" data-attributes="member: 41321">In my opinion, this system must give a way to search by distance.  I find systems that make me search by a keyword of some sort are extremely unhelpful.  I live in an area that's fairly close to two big cities (Providence and Boston) but ideally I'd like to find players much closer than either of those, so a system that makes me search by city name is either too small of a range (if I use my own town name) or too large (if I use either Boston or Providence).  And if I search by state, once again I get too large of a range (I don't want to have to drive all the way across Massachusetts for a game) and I'm close enough to Rhode Island that if my search only includes MA I might miss a significant portion of gamers who are much closer than the MA-only results.I believe the best way to do this is for the system to ultimately compare latitude and longitude of each user, but that lat and long doesn't need to be inputted by the user, and it doesn't need to be super accurate.  I don't really care if somebody is 15 miles away from me or 17, especially since I know the distance is "as the crow flies" and my car's mileage will probably show something different should I try to drive from one point to the other.Ideally people would be able to enter in their location as fine or as coarse as they like.  If the user inputs a broad area (like, the state of Texas) then that user's lat and long should be somewhere in the center of Texas.  It's not very accurate, but the user should probably expect this if they're inputting such a broad area.  However, if they were to input Dallas, TX then their distances will be much more accurate.  If they inputted their full address it would be the most accurate, but I'm not sure how fine you want to let people specify their location.  I would think you'd actually want to discourage this sort of thing if the system isn't secure.As far as how this would be implemented, I don't know.  There may already be services out there you can use that'll take a location in the form of text (like "Dallas, TX, USA") and return a lat and long.Other features I'd love:* Specify whether I'm looking to DM or play (or both)* Specify what types of games I like to play, and maybe even a ranking of each (so if you like some games more than others you can show that)* Search by distance and by gaming system (for example, search for D&D 4e players within 30 miles)* Not absolutely necessary, but it would be great if the list of gaming system had groups or a hierarchy or sorts so you could, for example, search for "D&D" and would get 4e, 3e, 3.5e, etc* Be able to create a "game" and post vacancies, and give information about that game* Be able to send bulk PMs/emails to users in the area that meet certain criteria (like players in a 10-mile radius who play D&D 4e) - would be opt-in by users, and ideally if you had opted to receive such messages you could still block individual users from messaging you if somebody is abusing the system or you just plain ol' don't like their gamesI'd like this sort of thing.  I'm not sure time zone would be the best way to search for gamers because sometimes if I have a game I'm playing at night and somebody across the globe is available in the morning then they can both play in the same game just fine (and this actually happens in my case, since I live on the east coast of the US and I play a game every Monday night with a player in Japan).An online game search system would probably work best a user looking for a game you could post up your available times for gaming (which would be stored in UTC/GMT time), your preferred online client (MapTool, OpenRPG, etc), and your game system info, while a user with an existing game that has vacancies could post up a listing for that game with similar information (when they play, what client they use, what game system they use).</blockquote>

Verification