Hi Stiofan,
I agree that it is not necessary to add locations in advance as locations will get added when a listing is added by user.
But looking at interface it is quite difficult to predict whether an end user will add a non existing city. It may be easy for novice user but not for an end user. Because I personally found it difficult to add the city.
Also there are many similar cities but they belong to different states and country. So these cities may be deleted by merge city option (I do not know how you designed merge city option and what parameters it considers while merging duplicate cities.)
In order to tackle such problems I have added a country initials to every cityname in list to identify similar cities from different countries.
For example Delhi may be a city in USA and India
Also Albany is city in california and Oregon states of USA.
So identifying the exact city among duplicates from search function on the homepage is quite difficult for end user. Also this will not be great user experience.
When starting a directory from scratch, it advisable to have at least some predefined locations so that spam users will not add any spam locations when they do not find any locations. Because deleting a spam listing will only delete listing but not spam locations added to locations database by spam user.
Ultimately it will be time consuming process to identify and check the authenticity of the locations added to the database and deleting spam locations.
World knows how spammers use all techniques to get their listing added to the database. When a directory is only meant for US only but still spammers will add locations from other country or locations not even existing in US.
There are many other reasons, where people do not like end user to add locations.
I have a dump data of yellowpages which is nothing but filled with spam.
So I do not think people would like to waste their precious time in managing spam.
Stiofan O’Connor 9 years, 7 months ago.
