best way to capture country/city on registration
 

hi all-

We want to capture the country and city of each user as they register, and we want to try and keep it as clean as possible because this data will be super useful for us in the future. Is there a best or standard way to create a dropdown that has all countries in it? I think it's not practical to do that for cities, but maybe there is some best practice for that too??

Any thoughts much appreciated!

thanks!!:)

The standard way would be to place the countries in a custom profile field but a profile field won't allow for 195 options. You'd need to break them up by continent or region or some other way.

Custom profile field can accommodate 195 county drop down.

I tested this on...
Apache: 2.4.29 MySQL: 5.7.20 PHP: 7.1.11

Adding cities would be too much information in my opinion. Some users would probably be hesitant to enter that info.

It can but it's poor design to ask members to scroll through that many options, especially on a mobile device. I tested this as well and it took at least eight scrolls to go from #1 to #195.

It's an option but probably not a good option. :)

Perhaps it would be nice to dynamically determine their country based on their IP address and then preselect the country in the dropdown? Not a perfect solution but in most cases it would get the country right.

Because of our subject matter, the country that a user comes from is really important. So, maybe having a huge dropdown for them to deal with during registration would be ok. Actually, I think we could probably get away with a huge city dropdown if such a thing were possible!