Well, if we can prolong this debate just a little longer, the fix will be finished before we are! 
so, how to make a kurogkug out of this, which lives forever? 
just leave the location blank
Mentioning k... is the equivalent of Godwin's Law on this site.
just leave the location blank
That does not help!
Also: Yes, it would be fairly easy to code such an option.
2: The country setting is used for the World League. The International option is used to express various stances. If you add another country setting to say: Hide me - what is the impact on other parts of the site? The change is not trivial.
If this is indeed a mistake, and it has still not been fixed, then it's perfectly acceptable to draw attention to it until it has; from the site owner's response in this thread, it is clear the matter had mistakenly been considered solved.
3: I'm not trying to stifle debate. I merely think that no strong case has been made for changing the map.
I dislike the quotes system here. It's so clunky and restricting...
1: Whichever way you look at it, there will be a large number of people who do not mind, or do not know enough about the issue to care. However, if they were presented with an option somewhere when creating an account saying, "Would you like your GeoIP information to be shown on the interactive map? This will allow people to see your approximate location", the numbers would be very different. Again, it would not be difficult to create an option such as this, because...
2: A new 'country' choice [i.e. "Hide me"] doesn't need to be created. The options available for selection need not consist of a specific country, International, and Hide me, and any coder who tried to implement such a thing might indeed run into problems with other site areas. However, any coder who designed such a system wouldn't be very good anyway. There are much less difficult solutions, such as adding a single boolean value in the form of a check box to a profile ["Show my location on the map"] that the site checks at the same time as checking your IP before displaying you on the map. If 0, the map won't show you. If 1, it will. Either way, you can keep your country/International on your profile if you like, no problem. Something akin to this is already done several times for other values, I imagine, as there are already filters available, such as checkboxes showing your friends; if not, then the same system used for those could be implemented. There will be no change to the rest of the site, as this is map-specific. Besides, "International" doesn't really mean much if your approximate physical location can be found anyway.
3: There is no other website that I can think of - and I tend to visit a fair number - that openly displays the locations of members without first asking permission, let alone without giving them an option to turn it off. Considering that the vast majority of free members, and a good portion of paying ones, very likely don't even know the map exists, they definitely aren't aware that their location is displayed. However small such a thing is to you, it wouldn't be to others. As for stifling debate, that isn't what I intended to imply; merely that, if Eric is mistaken about people without a location not being shown on the map, he might appreciate knowing about it.
Every website you visit has access to your IP address and your GeoIP location, just as chess.com does. For most websites which process this information, it is too valuable to simply display it; instead they use it to analyse their visitor demographic or to customise what they display.
The only sites on which it would make sense to display it are social networking sites. These are predicated on the notion of directories which you use to locate fellow members.
Facebook lets you search by name and location. I can enter the name of small town and it will show me the members from there.
Skype lets you search by Country, state, City, Language, Gender and Age range.
Friends Reunited shows you all the people in the school class you claim to have belonged to.
Such sites as these don't display maps but they make equivalent information available, in my view.
Just make it opt-in, and clear.
If you select this, we will use your IP address to determine your approximate location, and we will display it to other members. Unless selecting this, no location information is shown. It's not a problem for the site and doesn't have legal ramifications, it's just that you can treat the users better. Don't make anything more annoying thatn meebo.
It's not that difficult.
Every website you visit has access to your IP address and your GeoIP location, just as chess.com does. For most websites which process this information, it is too valuable to simply display it; instead they use it to analyse their visitor demographic or to customise what they display.
The only sites on which it would make sense to display it are social networking sites. These are predicated on the notion of directories which you use to locate fellow members.
Facebook lets you search by name and location. I can enter the name of small town and it will show me the members from there.
Skype lets you search by Country, state, City, Language, Gender and Age range.
Friends Reunited shows you all the people in the school class you claim to have belonged to.
Such sites as these don't display maps but they make equivalent information available, in my view.
You miss the point. All of those sites, each and every one of them, only displays information that you manually enter by choice. This is not the case here.
Facebook does not obtain your birth certificate from the government and broadcast the information to everybody without telling you in advance.
Skype doesn't make GeoIP available, just manual locations; all of the information displayed, bar number of contacts, is manually entered and, mostly, optionally private.
Friends Reunited is actually designed purely for people searching for others from their schools and such, but still doesn't force you to disclose anything without indication. Lying would be pointless, yes, but it is a site developed specifically to find people. It is why users sign up. It would be very difficult to do so without displaying school information. Chess.com? Chess site. There's no implication of any strength that it would display location without at least a warning.
Thanks Paul, a post very much "on the spot"! I wish (for the nth time) that the admins would notice this thread!
The stats about 7 out of 2 million members is not only inaccurate but wrong and has no weight at all in interpreting the results of the participants. Not only because there are not 2 million members on this site as the numbers will show in a month from now or so, around June 27th 2010, when accounts are merged but primarily because we are now allowed only 100 pages of posts which is about 2,000 posts maximum.
So the logical reference to the number of posts written on any topic should be measured against the max of 2,000 posts allowable to obtain a statistically measurable and meaningful confidence level or interval and a margin of error. This goes for any and all forums and posts.
If chess.com management does not want to recognize this limitation, then no posts are of any value statistically.
Now 7 people in favor is not a statistically a valid sufficient number.
However statistics is not always the answer to any poll.
The point debated here is about privacy of personal information.
And what if the topic contains a survey (or more than one)? Assume each of the 2,000 posts contains a survey and 1,000 respondents participate in each survey. This comfortably exceeds the 2,000 limit you have just proposed.
His assessment that only 7 people care was so obviously bogus even to a 5th grader, I didn't even want to get into that.
And more totally off the point remarks. Facebook and all others only use information that I have chosen to share with others. I can even make myself "unsearchable" should I choose...so I don't understand your small town point. I've never seen this information presented for the public to use.
My dear Afaf, by all means perform your own analysis. At the point I counted, 7 members had declared in support of changing the map, 3 were against. 24 were neither sufficiently for it nor against it to express a clear opinion. Those are the facts.
The notion of majority has been mentioned several times. It is usual to divide the number of 'votes' by either the sample size (34) or the whole population (1,990,631 Members or 345,534 Active Members). No matter how I crunch the numbers, I can't find a majority for your crusade.
And more totally off the point remarks. Facebook and all others only use information that I have chosen to share with others. I can even make myself "unsearchable" should I choose
Sweetest afaf, as others have pointed out, you haven't made yourself unsearchable on Facebook. On the contrary, you again use your full name there, a photograph and you cite a city of some 1,500000 million souls as your base. Clearly you are not personally trying to remain anonymous.
Here on chess.com, if one does not want to be found, one can adopt the same strategy as for any other web site: don't use your real name, don't use a photograph, don't list any personal information and don't discuss any personal information.
Since you have chosen to share so much information, it weakens your case that the website has publicised one item of data.
...so I don't understand your small town point. I've never seen this information presented for the public to use.
Afaf, My point was simply that I can guess a series of small towns, enter those names individually into a Facebook search, and home in on people in that way.
Visitor maps are becoming more ubiquitous ...
Another blog visitor’s location monitoring tool is from VisitorMap.org which is also a free service. It is different from ClustrMaps as it shows the location of all the visitors to your site in the last 24 hours. It also provides a facility to users to customize the map style, map size, visitor marker & color for the visitor markers.
Read more: http://inforids.com/visitors-maps-geographically-visualize-locate-visitors/#ixzz0s8FYYxzA
e.g. http://tools.digitalpoint.com/geovisitors.php
Soon, every Tom's Dick & Harry's blog will display one.
Yes, but are those points individually identifiable? Can you find associated usernames or do they republish the IP addresses? If so, and if done so without the users' express consent, then they are also gross violations of the privacy of the visitors.
It's important to make the distinction between sanitized data and that which infringes upon individual rights to privacy.
Yes, but are those points individually identifiable? Can you find associated usernames or do they republish the IP addresses? If so, and if done so without the users' express consent, then they are also gross violations of the privacy of the visitors.
It's important to make the distinction between sanitized data and that which infringes upon individual rights to privacy.
I have no way of knowing. As Visitor Maps pop up on more and more websites, some of them may well choose to identify individual users.
The Visitor Map (interactive member map) on chess.com is serving (at least) two different functions:
Agreed again, but I have been told that the admins promised to correct this feature already quite some time ago, so it should be fairly high up in the queue