One of the joys of working at Meetup is seeing the variety of things people meet up about all around the world. So, as we were doing final QA for the next release of our Android app, we tried a search for all Meetups within 100 miles of Tbilisi and were surprised to find the Toddler Olympics in Oakland County, Michigan, among the results.
A bug, of course, but why?
We did a bit of research and found that our database does in fact believe that the Meetup is in Georgia, so it wasn’t a bug in our search algorithm. Our next guess was that we had somehow flipped a sign, or confused latitude and longitude, but the real problem turned out to be more subtle.
It turns out that the Organizer of the Toddler Olympics didn’t want to post the full address of her house, so she’d written “TBA” — “To Be Announced.” However, the Georgian word for “lake” is “ტბა”, which can be transliterated into the Latin alphabet as “Tba”, and so our geocoder was confused.
There’s always something new to learn when dealing with user-generated data and a global userbase!
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I wrote a thing for makingmeetup about a strange bug we found: (update: the Internet has a few photos of ბაკანი ტბა (Tba...
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