The first is that with your location you can see how far away you are from other members.

The second is that certain forums benefit from knowing where a user exists - e.g. If there is a forum on fishing and some members want to meet up, you can see straight away who can feasibly take part. Other forums have the ability to enter placenames of course, but this isn't much use if somebody has only entered there country, or a placename which another user has never heard of!

In addition to the above, our SUS software client includes a funky little utility that shows a map of the world, and with user locations marked on it. There is also a more detailed local map for certain countries.

With knowledge about your approximate location, we can plan our future network development. For instance, if we find a large number of our members are located in Europe, we can setup a new data centre there. Likewise Asia, and so on. Furthermore, we can site the data centre in a more precise location optimised for maximum performance, rather than simply "in Europe/Asia".

Rather than entering your village name, enter the nearest town or village. Note however that the further afield the location, the more innaccurate the distances to fellow users.

Simply change the text of your location, after selecting it, to something more vague. e.g. enter the name of your county/district or nearest city name instead. The benefit here over the previous option is that you can still get accurate distance informtion in the forums.

Turn off the display of your location. This can be done in the settings menu of any forum you are subscribed to (this option can be set independantly for each forum, so you could show it in another forum if you wish).