Custom locations: unable to manage

Hi,

My idea was to have only one region enabled with one city and several neighbourhoods, which I added manually.

However whenever a new listing is added by a user the map API does not recognise my custom locations and just adds its own city plus brand new neighbourhood each time (so I end up with multiple versions of the same neighbourhood, one for each new listing brixton-1, brixton-2 etc)

I can see from main GD documentation that this is known issue

“One of the issues with this approach is that the custom location is not returned by the map API, so, new listings will may be located in previously merged cities… We do have plans to create an addon to make it easier to manage custom locations but we don’t have a timeline for that.”

This was posted 5 months ago, my question I guess is if it is in the works or has been abandoned?

To give you a concrete example– I have ‘Greater London’ as the custom/enabled region. I have set up just ‘London’ as the only option for the city, and several neighbourhoods for the drop down menu.

But for each new listing OSM API is forcing ‘London Bourough of xyz’ as the default City and ignoring my ‘London’ custom one. It is also creating new neighbourhoods to link to those ‘cities’ (ie boroughs) it automatically creates.

So for example where I would want the listing the be just ‘London’ for city and ‘Brixton’ for neighbourhood but when new listings are added they will end up being under ‘London Borough of Lambeth’ and ‘brixton-1’ for neighbourhood.

Yes I know I can merge locations manually each time and then change n/hood option manually for each listing, but this is too time consuming and unworkable in practice.

If there is no solution to this on the horizon I’ll abandon custom location idea completely and rethink the approach, but it would be great to know either way…
tia