For administrative, technical and security reasons, it’s always been necessary store IP addresses you use to access this site from against your user account.
In a move to increase community engagement, community trust and help combat nefarious actors, going forward, all accounts will be represented on the global map with a location derived from the IP address you use to engage with the site. This has happened in the past with Clustrmap but we’ve moved away from using their solution and instead use a more localised system. We download a IP location look up database from MaxMind and carry out cross-references locally to determine your approximate location. From this we use an even more approximate level of your location hierarchy using the list of geoname ids we get from MaxMind to determine a more vague location approximately at the city level. We look up anonymous geoname ids from www.geonames.org and that is totally independent of your account.
A location label will appear on all posts.
To ensure a reasonable level of privacy, the system will not refine your location further than your local “city” and indeed the granularity is likely even lower e.g. “Florida”, or “Wirral”, for smaller towns and cities.
This will be updated when you first post for a new cooldown period (currently 1 day).
If you are on holiday and the location is incorrect, you can always update your location on your profile manually back to your home location. However the automation will run again after the cooldown when you post again. If you don’t post whilst on your trip, your location will not be updated.
I may run a one off run for all accounts.
Thanks for your understanding.