Location, Location, Location ...

In my opinion County is useful because it shows if you are north, south, east or west and Country should be mandatory. Perhaps not put your town?

 

I found the best one so far to describe the current conditions Sorry I'll put North Tyneside back in tomorrow if it stops raining.

More seriously, in a gardening forum it is very useful to know where people are located, especially if outside of the general climate assumption of the UK (this is a UK based forum after all).

To protect privacy, a general description is best. In densely populated areas like mine it's impossible to drill down too near to identify a house, but in a rural setting the name of the village may be too much information to share publicly online.

As a compromise, a good indication of your climate is very useful in a forum like this, but it's a good idea not to get too specific.

And Google does bring funny results if trying to googlemap places that don't exist. At that point it tries to find the next best solution, using your own location as the first assumption. When I first googlemapped "moon" I got all restaurants in Newcastle that had "moon" in their name.

 

I started off with Inverness as my location but changed it to my nearest town Beauly which is quite a way from where I live. Living rurally my house can't be located with SatNav so I doubt it can be found on a map without my full address.

 

I admit, due to my general lack of computer know-how. I have probably ar times given out more than required information.

What really does get me, is the way Google scans everything that that you put on the internet, and uses it in other quotes etc. I was shocked more than once, to find various threads I had put in gardening forums, sometimes showing up all over the place. It is so easy, even for the computer guru, to mention in posts that you are not far from the old gasworks or whatever.

Back to giving some indication of your whereabouts. I often use the 'Hardiness maps' and just the country.

 

Could I bring this thread back to life, please? But perhaps aimed more at Forum admin. Is there some way of requesting that new members indicate their location when they sign up? It really would save so much time and uncertainty for members wishing to help and offer advice

 

Many years ago we all started putting location and climate zone in our signatures. I may be the only one with this info now

 

Have you noticed that Wigan is Zone 8B+ though ! This is due to the warming effect of the gulf stream, coming up the Leeds and Liverpool canal