My Pony can ride for more than 100 miles.

August 24, 2010 1:31 PM

IRL Pony: Adjustable location radius for IRL events.

I'm one of those people stuck in Nowheresville USA, but I'm willing to travel to a meetup if some awesome people are going to be there. For me, Nashville flirts with the 100 mile range limit, and while St. Louis and Louisville are right out, I'm willing to do some road trippin' to the places. I'm looking to IRL to say don't show me things in 100 miles, show me 200 or 250. Whaddaya say?

posted by deezil to Feature Requests at 1:31 PM (21 comments total)

I like that idea. The system has to check anyway to see how many miles away each event is, right? So pb, how hard would it be to have an option in the profile (or somewhere) to change the 100 miles to something larger on a per user basis?

Or would it be easier/make more sense to just up the distance for everyone?
posted by theichibun at 1:40 PM on August 24, 2010

Find Events by Location:

Coming Soon
posted by Roger Dodger at 1:40 PM on August 24, 2010

I could use a 200 mile radius, to be sure.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:01 PM on August 24, 2010

Wow. I won't even go to Brooklyn.
posted by CunningLinguist at 2:12 PM on August 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

8000 miles should do it.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:13 PM on August 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wonder if there's a good way to automagically figure out what the appropriate 'nearby users' radius should be. Like, if 'within 100mi' only returns 10 or so other MeFites, the circle widens until a more substantial number is attained (20? 40?). Then, instead of having a user defined pref for radius you could ask for a desired lowest number of nearby users and it (this magical it, MetaFilter!) would scale out until that number is reached.
posted by carsonb at 2:21 PM on August 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I think we can do this as a profile preference. I'll add it to the to do list.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:28 PM on August 24, 2010

I would like the option for Boolean radii.
posted by TwelveTwo at 2:32 PM on August 24, 2010

What about by country? I wouldn't mind seeing everything in Canada? If I'm going to a meetup I'm probably taking a plane anyway.
posted by ODiV at 3:17 PM on August 24, 2010

The kml file works great for that, ODiV.
posted by carsonb at 3:22 PM on August 24, 2010

For the record I am not going to Brooklyn either.
posted by cjorgensen at 3:32 PM on August 24, 2010

You want this page, ODiV. From there, subscribe to the RSS or iCal feeds to be alerted when new events in Canada are posted.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:36 PM on August 24, 2010

Nice, thanks!

How do I get there from the main site?
posted by ODiV at 3:45 PM on August 24, 2010

How do I get there from the main site?

There's no straight path right now. Here's how I got there:

1.) Visited the front page.
2.) Found a Canadian location in the sidebar—Calgary, AB—clicked.
3.) Clicked "Canada" in the trail of links at the top of the page which read: Home > Canada > Alberta > Calgary.

From the top of any individual post, you can click a wider region to get to that region's page.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:06 PM on August 24, 2010

yeah, I'm psyched about that "find by loc" thing too, esp. since I have a bogus loc in my profile to keep the zombies off my trail
posted by toodleydoodley at 4:15 PM on August 24, 2010

You can set your nearby distance in your preferences now. Scroll down to "Optional Fields", and look for Nearby is [   ] miles. The default is 100 miles. We now use this value for both IRL Upcoming events near you and nearby users on profile pages.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:24 AM on August 25, 2010

SWEET.
posted by edbles at 1:09 PM on August 25, 2010

PB, I think I love you. Thanks for letting my pony ride as far as it wants!
posted by deezil at 10:18 AM on August 27, 2010

No problem!

I guess this is a good place to mention that Find events by location is working at IRL now. So ODiV, now you can go to IRL, type "Canada", and click go. A link to this page should be the first result. That's a more direct route to finding it in the future.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:57 AM on August 27, 2010

What are these "miles" you speak of?
posted by ODiV at 11:01 AM on August 27, 2010

They're exactly like 1.6 of your distance units. You'll love them.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:04 AM on August 27, 2010