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Hi, i was just wondering if this was something that was planned to be added later, on any dating site it's useful to know who is near you.

Yeah! It's planned. I had a few issues with getting some parts of it to work, so it's not pushed up to the site yet. Definitely important.

Yeah, I think this is one of the most important features to have on a site like this!

This feature's on hold for a bit. It will involve switching my database to a different architecture - from MySQL to Postgres with PostGIS extensions. On top of that, the site would need to ask Google for a latitude and longitude everytime someone puts in a new location. When searching nearby, it would ask Google again for the latitude and longitude of the center point, and compare with each user's coordinates in the PostGIS database. Unfortunately, the database transition would be a delicate operation (not impossible, just a hassle). Mainly though, the connections to Google's Maps API for getting coordinates can cost extra money.

The alternative to asking Google is to import a huge list of cities with coordinates from here... http://download.geofabrik.de/ Lots of small towns will be missing, some extra junk like ghost towns included, and it would still cost for the storage. (about ~3.5GB for the US alone). And that doesn't include postal codes either.

Soo, I still plan on it at some point, but I've shelved it for a while.


When traffic starts picking up, it'll start really costing, but it will also be needed so much more, so I'll probably end up using Google Maps API and rolling out location search then. Right now, since the site is still quite young and has low traffic, I think the site should get by without it. The danger to the site of any added costs outweighs the benefit of the feature at the moment.