Add address to map issues

Hi,

I’m having a few issues with setting up locations and would appreciate your advice.

My listings are UK only and for a specific County. There is one city and 20+ towns. There are hundreds of villages and hamlets, and whilst I want places/events in those villages, I don’t want them all on the drop-down. So, I’ve opted for a “nearest town” approach (i.e. the listing owners choose the nearest town to their location, and subsequently when a site user filters based on that town they’ll see listings for the town and the nearest villages.

This approach was adopted by another UK user here:- https://wpgeodirectory.com/support/topic/problems-with-cities/ and I suspect many UK users are taking a similar approach to ensure their directories provide quantity and quality.

My settings are:-
Default Country
Default Region
Selected Towns

However, I’m encountering some issues when carrying out some tests. When adding test locations I do so in the same way I would expect the majority of listing owners would; Cutting and pasting in the address.

Here’s a couple of example addresses.
1) Baconsthorpe Castle, Baconsthorpe, Norfolk, NR25 6LN
Baconsthorpe is a village near to the town of Holt.
2) Thursford, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 0AS
Thursford is a village near to the town of Fakenham.
3) Park Farm, Cawston Road, Salle, Norfolk, NR10 4SG
Salle is a village neat the town of Reepham.

1) The first issue encountered is the default City (Norwich) always shows in the dropdown. So, whatever is input if this isn’t manually changed it’ll only plot that location (not a biggy but from a usability p.o.v. not great.)

2) The google address autocomplete doesn’t complete the address. It just replaces the address with the post code only. I’ve tried with this disalbed but still no good.

3) If I change the City/Town dropdown to any town this location is plotted instead of the listing address

4) If I change the dropdown to “select Town/city” when adding these addresses to the map I get the warning message “Please choose any address of the ([list of town/cities]) cities only”.

I’ve tried loads of permutations of the addresses, varying what is/isn’t selected on the dropdowns. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent way to try to get them to plot the address correctly on the map with the right location dropdown and not bring up a warning message.

Yes, I could just have Multi-City selected to allow little villages to be added, but that would be no good as this would then lead to hundreds of small village/hamlet locations being added, each with perhaps one or two listings which would be no good from a usability point of view. Users don’t search for tourist information at such a granular level. The “nearest Town” model is what is required.
(For info, I was also hoping to assign towns to pseudo sub-regions [e.g. North Norfolk, The Broads,] but can’t contemplate this until the nearest town issue is resolved.)

After spending far to long on trying to get this work the way I need it to I give up; I need your help! 🙂

Here’s a link to the “add Place” listing.
http://dev2.norfolkplaces.co.uk/add-listing/?listing_type=gd_place

Let me know if you need backend details.

Cheers.