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Map “Pin” vs Actual address

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Map “Pin” vs Actual address

Map “Pin” vs Actual address

Browsing one of the cities in my country ( Australia) today, I noticed a number of members whose pins showed in the CBD ( downtown business district)

Closer examination however revealed that several did NOT live in the CBD at all – at least one was 13 kms away, another much further.

Does this matter ? Well, it would be possible for a traveler to contact this Host, even arrange a Stay, without realizing that the map location was incorrect ( and very misleading). If you were very unlucky, you could backtrack to your arranged stay, adding 13 x 2 km to your day (!)

Why do Hosts do this ?

• Some seem to think that Guests are unable to comprehend an address that they ( the Guests) can’t locate on eg a map of the World.

• Some Hosts want to “attract’ any visitors to their region, as though there is a competition (!) for having Guests; to do this, they provide a false but …. “ catchy” address in a metropolitan area, in the hope of enhanced “harvesting” from the available supply of Guests … [I have seen a Host in Istanbul who describes this explicitly in his own Profile !]

• Some Hosts have an exaggerated sense of privacy and deliberately obscure their real location.

[ Do I need to say : my own Map Pin shows me ~ 100 m from my actual location, this providing complete privacy ]

Now, none of these reasons make sense to me, and I am continually surprised that Hosts see fit to do this.

it’s impossible to generalize about WS Members. But in my experience, there are plenty whose comprehension of the real needs of a bicycle traveler is ..not “well developed”, though I’d prefer to say “ poor” or even “ counter productive”.

I hasten to point out, some of these Hosts have much better FB than mine, so maybe this doesn’t bother anyone but me !

My solution : WS admin could Message these Members to explain the need for an accurate Map location. (It would need only a simple pro-forma message)

It would help if there were local “champions” in different places who could alert WS Central to these cases. As far as I know, there is no such system of devolved responsibility.

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Map Pin placement

I noticed this same thing here in Canada, and was quickly asked to volunteer as a 'map location enhancer' (not really the title) A lot of errors we're from language differences, data entries, or simply a request to hosts to use the map feature to locate their home. I have my house properly mapped, along my phone numbers on my profile and have never had an issue. If anything it makes it easier for riders using data to locate my home. Feel free to offer your services, and hopefully it will help everyone. The new website may treat this differently, not sure. We'll see!

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I discovered over the weekend

I discovered over the weekend that my map pin was in the wrong location, through no fault of my own. I contacted warmshowers and it was corrected. I was told that this was a bug with google, and we were sent and email a while back about it.

Today I find that my pin (and 2 others in my city) are located in city center again. I moved my pin again and let them know my change over the weekend didn't stick.

So I wouldn't assume that the hosts are even aware their pin is in the wrong spot.

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There have been problems with

There have been problems with the automatic geolocation based on address data for some time, but what you are describing was standard behaviour even before the bugs. The system would attempt to locate a member as accurately as possible based on their address data if they didn't manually set their map location. If it could only extract a city but no meaningful street address out of the data it would rely on a database of city centre coordinates to use - this works similarly at the national level and, yes, there is even a global dumping ground for addresses from which no meaningful data could be extracted, at 0 degrees longitude and latitude:

One unfortunate side effect of this is if new members signed up entering the least amount of information possible they would be marked as available to host and put at 0km from city centre, thus putting them at the top of list searches for their city. Many of these members become black holes into which so many requests disappear without a trace, while more active involved members who actually want to host appear much further down the list and barely reeceive any requests at all.

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I agree with Paul Harper

I agree with Paul Harper except the current map still shows my correct address and a pin half a mile away.

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I manually moved my pin the

I manually moved my pin the other day and it seems to have stuck so far.

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I'm not sure I follow. I just

I'm not sure I follow. I just explained why members' pin locations could differ from their entered addresses and you agree with me, so why the 'except'?

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a right location?

Is not it so that Google traces your computer address (a location of your internet connection ) and not your street address? F.i. I don’t provide any identification details, but still, get a pin on the map, not there I actually live, but exactly there I sit and use a computer.

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You have a city and country

You have a city and country selected as per your profile (as I recall everyone has to enter these as a bare minimum when they register) - and so the map locates you using the best approximation it can according to those details.

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i am *not* complaining about a Member not providing a "...meaningful street address .."

I don't provide a street address myself. Instead, my " pin" shows as ~ 500m away from where we live. I can't remember how I did that, but I imagine I simply listed my *suburban* location *without* reference to my metropolis - which is 80km long by 30 wide (!) I believe this is entirely "meaningful" [ to a bicycle traveler] while still preserving our privacy.

However, this is not well understood : ie that a "metropolitan" address is hardly useful in our context. WS might work a little better if it was understood.

Meanwhile, this syndrome is just a barnacle on our great ship....