Tip #13- Map the eateries you are posting about.

We’ve recently added the ability to add a location to the first post of a discussion in the Regional Dining forums! That means now, in addition to accessing the discussions in a chronological order or via the search engine, you can now search restaurants in the neighborhoods you are interested in.

To see the map of your region, click the Map button at the top of your board. You will see all the discussions in the neighborhood. Click on any you are interested in.

But we need everyone who start a new post about an eatery to enter the location of the eatery before it’ll show up on the map. Here’s how to do it:

When you started a new topic, click the Add Location button:

Then enter the address in the address field. If the map provider finds the location on the mapping engine, it’ll return the result just below the address you entered. Click on it, and click done. Sometimes the mapping engine can’t find a match, try changing the address slightly- e.g. ‘Street’ to ‘St’, take out unnecessary punctuation, etc. Oftentimes the location will gets mapped. And if so, you are done. Skip the following instructions.

But, the mapping engine (we use Mapquest) are better mapping addresses in some countries (e.g. U.S.) than in others (e.g. Cambodia). In some countries, no matter what you address you enter, the mapping engine just won’t map. In those cases, you can directly enter the latitude and longitude so the location shows up on the map.

How do you get the lat/long? Go to Google Map. Find your location, right click the location marker.
Click ‘What’s here’.

The latitude and longitude will show up at the bottom of the map. Highlight the lat/long with your mouse, right click Copy. Then paste the lat long into the address field of the Add Location window instead of an address. Click Done. (Why you say don’t we just use Google Map as a provider? They are proprietary enough that they don’t work with the mapping feature!)

You are done!


What if you want to go back and add location to discussions you started previously, but you can no longer edit the post?

Contact us! We’ll give you editing ability so you can go back and add the location to the first post.


All other, if you see your post edited but don’t notice anything different about the post, most likely your moderators added the location to the first post.


Here’s the world dining map, which combines the maps of all regions:

8 Likes

ooh, this is great. will use!

I like this function, generally it works well. A few times the location does not work when it could not find the place in a remote city (e.g. Siem Reap) or it did not locate the place correctly (in the case of the Spanish Tenerife).

Just a suggestion: the mapping is good when it is the case of 1 thread 1 restaurant. When the case of 1 thread, several restaurants, we can’t map this. Is there a way to have this improved?

3 Likes

And now the map is directly visible to the right of the topic list for the geo discussions!

1 Like

How do we deal with mapping in posts that mention multiple restaurants, like trip reports?

I don’t think you can right now, just like what @naf wanted upstream. Unless the developer wants to build the plugin to allow location per post versus per discussion.

@hungryonion
I would like to add location tag to the following post. I forgot when writing the post. Thanks.

Maybe it is my system, but I couldn’t get the Add Location feature to work on my last post, it kept saying while I was typing the address “you’ve tried this too many times, wait __ seconds and try again”, but never let me finish it.

Odd. I used ‘836 Clement St, San Francisco, CA 94118’ and it worked fine. What address did you try to use?

It must have been my slow system - it kept sort of timing out on me. I was using 836 Clement but by the time I was typing “Street” it would say wait and try again. Anyway, glad you got it in thanks!

There were some issues with the mapping feature, specifically with the prior mapping provider that began on 1/15/2024. We just changed the mapping provider and the mapping feature is working again.

Since this is a new mapping provider, it may map slightly differently than before when it comes to address syntax, etc. If you encounter any issues, please flag. Also, please share any feedback on how well the new mapping provider maps compared to the old one.

@klyeoh

3 Likes

Thanks, @sck ! I’ll go try it out.