1394179 - Almost all Portland, Oregon contributors are incorrectly listed as being from Portland, Texas

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, enhancement)

Description

[Noah (NoahSUMO/SolidSnake) [:Noah]]

Found this issue about a month back. Kept forgetting to file it. :)
Something caused ~98% of Portland, Oregon Mozillians to have their states switched to Portland, Texas.
Admittedly this a very minor bug. The affected people could probably change back their correct states after being notified with a mass email. But maybe the change won't stick if there's a deeper bug here. So it might useful to see if other locations were silently changed to the wrong ones. :P

Yousef mentioned there was some work done to the location database not too long ago. So that might be responsible.

Simple solution:
We could auto-update it with a query by looking at both the user's city & timezone. If it's US/Pacific, America/Los_Angeles or America/Vancouver, we change it to Portland, Oregon. If the timezone is blank/empty [some were too lazy to set it], we still change it to Oregon. But if it's US/Eastern, we leave it alone since there are 3 Portlands on the east coast. Pretty much if the timezone is pacific or blank, we change it to Oregon.

Unfortunately there are a bunch of Portlands in the U.S.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland#United_States
The good news though is the majority of our community is in Portland, OR. :)

The affected ~149 users are scattered thru here:
https://mozillians.org/en-US/search/?q=portland

Only a few users are from a different Portland (like Portland, Maine):
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/erin/ [Portland, ME in bottom of bio]
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/jpolcek/ [US/Eastern timezone]

Comically only 18 users have survived the silent mass location change:
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/dietrich/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/jbryner/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/John-Galt/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/mbranson/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/bgins/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/tanya.crenshaw/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/jkrejci/ [new hire, Sept. 2016]
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/just1n/ [new Pocket hire, March 2017]
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/tnem/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/peterspdx/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/victoria/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/rjung/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/Boek/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/jdemocker/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/dhartnell/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/garbados/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/kbrosnan/
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/7022andre/
^ All the people I could find with Portland, Oregon correctly set.

Comment 1

[Henrik Mitsch [:hmitsch]]

Great catch!
:Noah, thanks for reporting this.

I'd like to take a manual solution:
Send an email to the ~149 users and ask them to verify their location data.

The reason I'd go for this low-tech approach is lack of development energy due to other priorities (IAM, CoSS).

Noah, what do you think about this?
If you agree, we will get that email ready.

-Henrik

Comment 2

[Noah (NoahSUMO/SolidSnake) [:Noah]]

You're welcome, Henrik! :D

Sure, let's do the manual solution. Hopefully they'll be patient with our current login system & login to fix their location. But a few months from now, if there's still a sizable amount of users who haven't updated their location, would it be ok to automate this? Assuming there's free dev time, of course. :)

Comment 3

[Bradley Cohen [:supnah]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 2.58.00 PM.png

Hilariously, not only were we changed, but Portland, OR doesn't come up as an option when I tried to change myself back, and Portland, TX is the only option.

Comment 4

[Viorela Ioia [:viorela]]

(In reply to Bradley Cohen [:supnah] from comment #3)
> Created attachment 8910006 [details]
> Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 2.58.00 PM.png
> 
> Hilariously, not only were we changed, but Portland, OR doesn't come up as
> an option when I tried to change myself back, and Portland, TX is the only
> option.

Bradley, you currently don't see Portland, Oregon as an option because you probably have Region = Texas, US. 
We are restricting city options based on the option selected for Region field (and Region based on the option selected for Country field). 
In your case, you should follow the next steps, in order to set your city to Portland, OR:
  1. Navigate to Settings -> Location.
  2. Change the Region field to "Oregon, United States".
  3. Select "Portland, Oregon, United States" option for the City field.

Comment 5

[Greg Cox [:gcox]]

This no longer exists because mozillians has been supplanted by people.mozilla.org. Closing.