for what it’s worth, i would not recommend that anyone look at that discussion, since it’s likely just going to cause unnecessary confusion. it looks like there’s a true issue described in this (Jefferson Davis, MS) thread related to the matching process between Google’s location results and iNaturalist’s places, though it’s easily worked around, as noted by jwidness. (and that method of searching for places is probably the better way to filter for geography in general on the Explore screen anyway.)
it may be worth noting that the problem described here appears to be different than what’s described in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-for-santa-rosa-ca-gives-wrong-bounding-box/22052. the problems described in that thread are technically working as designed, i think, but the design may not work well in these cases and may need to be rethought.
in general, i think the best way to redesign the location vs place filter is to reframe things as:
- a place filter that searches and returns only iNaturalist places
- a bounding box filter that allows you to either
- manually define a bounding box based on a set of coordinates (which could also work in concert with the Redo Search in Map button)
- define a bounding box based on a location from Google Maps.
- (define a bounding circle based on center point and km radius)
i think this would make it more clear how iNat places differ from bounding boxes and would eliminate the logic needed to match Google locations and iNaturalist places.