Popular Locations Showing Locations with No Listings

This topic contains 12 replies, has 3 voices, and was last updated by  Jeff Adams 7 years ago.

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  • May 25, 2018 at 7:50 pm #432209

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    I noticed a few times that the Popular Locations widget, like the one at the bottom of my homepage, has locations that have nothing.

    Shouldn’t a “Popular Location” have at list one listing in it? There is nothing “Popular” about a location that has no listings.

    I’m sure there may be a reason it is doing this. Can someone please fix it so that it does not do this? I would like to use this widget if it can truly show “Popular Locations”.

    So, for example, if you go to VeganLinked.com and scroll to the bottom where the widget is and click “Forest City” there are no listings there.

    May 26, 2018 at 5:30 am #432242

    Alex Rollin
    Moderator
    Post count: 27815

    Hello,

    The option is to show fewer locations.

    At this time it is expected that some cities may not have listings.

    Demo: https://wpgeo.directory/supreme-directory/location/united-states/california/san-francisco/

    May 27, 2018 at 12:36 am #432332

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    Thanks for the response but I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. I was expecting to see listings when I go to a city in the “Popular Location” section of the site. But, when I go to Forest City there are no listings. This is misleading and makes the site look broken.

    Can someone please make it so the popular location widget only shows locations that at least have one listing/event?

    May 27, 2018 at 9:44 am #432345

    Alex Rollin
    Moderator
    Post count: 27815

    The recommended way to use Geodirectory is to add listings, and each listing has a location. The locations are then added to the list of all locations, which list is accessible through the Multilocations settings.

    The assumption then is that if a city exists, then, it is because there is or was a listing in that city.

    It may be that the first place the ‘orphan’ locations are noticed is in the popular locations widget because that widget will make a query of the locations, as opposed to the bookmark links that appear on the detail page.

    If a listing is removed, the location is not removed. In some cases, then, there may be ‘orphan’ cities.

    Locations are managed from Geodirectory – Multilocations – Manage Locations

    Instead of deleting a location, though, best practice is to merge them, so that no listings become orphaned.

    https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/manage-location/#merge

    Merge “Forest City” into the nearest city and then Forest City will no longer appear in the Widget.

    May 28, 2018 at 4:18 pm #432479

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    I completely understand what you’re saying, as for why the “Popular Locations” is showing empty cities.

    Combing through cities to discern which are empty and then merging or removing them is not at all practical use of my time though. The goal is to have a huge, successful directory. In which case it would be very time consuming, hard, maybe even impossible, to assess every city. Right now I’m very busy networking and creating content for the site coupled with everything else involved in making the site successful. What you’re suggesting would take away from my time populating and networking the site which is very important. I believe I speak for all directory owners too, not just me… I just don’t see combing through cities very good use of our time to compensate for the plugin’s inability to only show cities with listings. It seems like it the widget could be designed so that it only showed cities with listings. Isn’t that something that the developers can do to improve the widget?

    Thanks for your time in explaining the workaround. I hope you understand my perspective and desire. I love how my site is coming along. I am excited to reach a point where the site is so functional that I can spend all my time networking and producing content for it. Thanks again and hope you’re all having a great day!

    May 28, 2018 at 5:09 pm #432484

    Alex Rollin
    Moderator
    Post count: 27815

    If that is important to you, you can make a feature request here: https://wpgeodirectory.com/requests/

    If it is important to others, they will vote it up and then the team will look at it.

    We do not undertake customizations in the forum.

    May 28, 2018 at 8:06 pm #432512

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    I understand, thank you for sharing, I posted it here because it appears like an existing feature bug, not a feature request. Thanks

    May 30, 2018 at 12:30 am #432658

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    I am realizing more and more the issue here. My directory uses your event listings feature. Events may often be in different cities than place listings. This creates cities in the database. When those events pass there will not be anything in those cities. This will populate the “Popular Locations” with empty cities the more this happens. In my case that could be very soon. It really needs to filter out empty cities especially because of this.

    The “Popular Places” also doesn’t seem to “sort”. The way this is designed right now with no search or setting/or default for filtering out empty listings, I imagine this widget will become more harmful than good because showing empty pages/results/locations is a bad thing.

    I’ll just use it for now while I’m very aware of what’s on the site. It’s just that the more my site grows the more this feature will have to go it seems.

    May 30, 2018 at 7:45 am #432698

    Alex Rollin
    Moderator
    Post count: 27815

    It is possible to add additional widgets to the home page so they show up on the location pages, with or without the location filter, to make sure the pages aren’t empty.

    May 30, 2018 at 7:36 pm #432841

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    If someone picks a particular city they should either see listings in or at least in proximity to that city. If there are not relevant listings to show then that city shouldn’t be an option.

    Right now I live near Forest City. If I click on Forest City and see nothing then I missed out on clicking a city that has a lot of listings.

    After clicking Forest City the site goes to the location page with forest city selected. As a new visitor I have no way of knowing that Forest City is a popular city but has no listings. I see “Popular Categories” none of which are forest city, but as a new visitor I don’t know this. I think 1.) because it said forest city was popular and 2) I picked forest city that 3) now it shows forest city in the advance search field that 4) popular categories must be in forest city. When I click one it’s not in forest city at all because it’s a CPT and somewhat as you suggested without a location filter. So, then I go back and select different CPT’s and none of them show anything in Forest City. Now I have just wasted a lot of time accomplishing nothing because the popular location widget showed me a location that has nothing in it.

    As a site owner I do not want to subject my visitors to all this. So, the popular location widget is really only good for sites that don’t have events in locations where listings are not found or sites that do not have events and only listings and site owners that constant check the popular locations for empty locations.

    I really just want to know, is there any chance they could fix this widget so that it is indeed “popular locations” because it is at least sorted by popularity and even better sorted by popularity and filters out empty cities?

    May 30, 2018 at 7:39 pm #432843

    Alex Rollin
    Moderator
    Post count: 27815

    Hi Jeff,

    the solution for now is to either add listings to the city, use widgets that display the listings in the city, or merge the city.

    https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/manage-location/#merge

    May 30, 2018 at 10:07 pm #432863

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31211

    A note has been left for developers to make sure that in v2 we don’t count past events.

    Thanks

    May 30, 2018 at 10:59 pm #432867

    Jeff Adams
    Free User
    Post count: 1780

    Awesome, so the Popular Location widget in V2 may be such that it doesn’t show cities with past events only, that would be awesome! Esp. if it can sort by popularity and filter out empty cities 🙂

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