Compulsory sign-up location & join date details in 2011.

[Pauldesign]

Hi Moderators,

I see there are no available thread i can scam on and just out of curiosity and nothing personal and if i'm not mistaking or causing trouble to sensitive members; why details such as Location and Date join fields be made compulsory when first signing PICAXE forum initiation.

There are new picaxers who have joined date of Jan 1970 (i assumed they never entered any, thus, software assigned default date {i.e Jan 1970} to them) and no locations at all. I think it will be interesting for forum members to know the different nationalities (or part of world or Universe the post/thread is coming from) using PICAXE forum and also these infos (even if the member provide wrong details, which might be a silly thing to do as there is no need to be shy) sometimes help when responding to a thread or post.

It will be nice if the software can be adjusted such that as from 2011, new picaxe members can only sign-up or register, provided they enter a valid location and a valid current date.

Well, just a thought.

Rgds

 

[MartinM57]

I'm sure join dates for forumites who have joined since the mass migation of users from the previous forum software (where we all got our 1/1/70 dates) are correct - so no need to for anyone to enter it.

I don't think that Location should be mandatory (although I agree it's nice to see and sometimes helpful when making replies) and I've no idea how valid locations could be realistically checked for....

 

[westaust55]

While on am on the fence in some ways with respect to display of a members "location" and I am happy to indicate my location,
what does bug me are the members who post and ask such things as:

"where can I locally get/find a xxx"​

but do not indicate where they are on this planet

But probably not much different to :

"where can I get xxx from without breaking the bank"​

and no indication what is their idea of expensive/cheap.



And yes I do know where in Australia you can get XXXX

 

[John West]

When they say "locally" I assume they mean the Local Cluster.

 

[BeanieBots]

The forum needs to respect the anonymity of its members so I can't see those fields ever becomming compulsory but it is in the posters interest to fill in those details when they post questions such as those pointed out by Westy.
As for checking if the details (location) are correct, that can easily be done. That's how we check for and identify spammers.
Join dates have been correct for many years now. The "1970" members are those who were transferred over from the old forum.