All a person has to do is click on the ‘avitar’ and the zone is there.
So, I don’t see the issue, except for a brand new person.
And the option to compete the zone when first
signing up might take care of that if not now.
Not everyone wants to give their town or city upon first entering a strange forum.
Would there be a way to send out some notification…
Just a request, not mandatory.
That people add their state , zone , to their profile ?
And add that to the sign up part too…
So once and done .
Many members may miss this post …
We could pin a post requesting everyone fill it out with detailed instructions, maybe that would help…
Right after I set up the forum I tried to write some code to get the zone to show without having to click on the user avatar. It ended up being too hard for me to figure out in the time I devoted to it, and it didn’t seem all that bad to have to do one click if you wanted to see it.
Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it. 
Hey @scottfsmith
Think you could edit your first post to add that it is very helpful for every member to state their general location and zone within their profile. And then say, the more information, the better!
something like that…
Good idea, Dax! I edited it.
Please take a look and see if it looks good. @mamuang thanks for your instructions, I used them as a basis for what I wrote. While I was at it I made a few other improvements to that pinned post. It had not been edited in several years.
I add it to my name. Just seems like common sense given the purpose. Perhaps a prompt to do that could be added for when we join.
I think it all depends on how USA-cetric the forum wants to be, after all the zones that are talked on this subject are USDA zones, not Canadian or our local ones. Personally I detest the zone-worshiping (okay, maybe that was a bith harsh), because it is really inadequate way of telling anything else but the lowest temp. It does not matter a bit if it does not go below the 6b mark if the lenght of the summer and heat units are insufficient to mature the wood or the fruit. I think the world has vastly enhanced systems (I love Köppen-Geiger ), but for some reason garden and plant forums have not tested these and they remain in use for the scientific people.
All this is guesswork and ranting, sorry for that 
Well when talking to people in other countries, every one of them gave me a zone number. So most of the world has adopted the system anyway. First time I heard it was an issue in other countries? I have been here six years and the issue never came up till now. .
Thanks for pointing that out… it looks like they have made things better since I looked into this a long time ago. The main problem I had was the custom fields were not public (not stored in the normal database table with user name etc) and they were all but impossible to get at. But it looks like there is now an extension which allows you to lift some fields to being public now.
That said, it looks like you need to write a theme component to get it to work. Also all of these customizations have been very brittle and upgrades cause them to fail. Maybe it has gotten better though. I might look into coding it at some point, or perhaps you are interested?? 
@Janne.L yes the USDA zones are not the best, but they are better than nothing. It is not hard to get the zone for any place in the world, just figure out your average lowest low, convert C to F, and look at the USDA zone table.
It is more of necessity to translate to USDA zones, since it is only realistic way to talk in English speaking forums that have many US people in them. If one visits UK or Canadian forums (public forums), there starts immidiately be more variation when talking about zone maps. I think actually there should be separate discussion about different climate maps, haha, so I am not going to sully this conversation any more.
Very good Scott. I like the whole first post how it reads.
Hello @Janne.L now if I were you I would begin my profile writing “I live in (here) and this is what grows great here and here’s what doesn’t…” or something other, clever.
First you gotta write something and I’m not talking just about you but anyone that joins that doesn’t list any zone data, (they) should write something. Maybe as broad as I live in Mississippi and it’s hot and humid here and rarely does it freeze. Anything and that broad really helps paint a picture.
Thankfully if someone cares enough about your questions they will go to a Europe zone map that the USDA has put together and if they know your location (let’s say you wrote England) and that would begin the painting process of how they’re going to begin to keep the conversation flowing and to invite others to continue to help and eventually who knows… maybe a proper answer is given.
I greet you well.
Dax
I can give it a go, if you’d like. I’ll need a couple of days to search through Discourse’s forums, & github code, to see if I can code a solution that doesn’t get overridden on updates, and one that doesn’t need to force the user’s db table Zone column public, but respects the user’s “hide my public profile and presence features” setting. Unless, you want it to be forced public (then, following that link’s post may be simplest)? Also, I have 80+ pawpaw seedlings to pot
The zone field you added is a text input field, so, if we can get it to show after the user’s name, @Janne.L & others could also write non USDA zones if they wanted (or, anything they wanted to show after their name…). Could potentially be abused, but converting the zone column to some other integer(s)/letter(s) (5a, 5b,…), limited, input, might be much more complicated, and probably force everyone to need to re-update that info. Although, that would make it easy to do things like custom css that colors the zone info differently, If you wanted to - like; zone 2 blue, zone 6 chartreuse, zone 8+, red, etc. but now I’m getting carried away. Might also want to show the Location field, or merge it with Zone field, as they seem to be basically the same thing; into one custom field that user’s can have show after their name, but that’s all up to you.
If you want the zone field forced public, following that link’s solution should work. I think you would just need to change version=“0.8.27” to whatever version you currently have, the number after user_field_ to whatever the Zone field is in user_fields.json, and copy-paste that script into the /header section under Themes, under Customize, after adding the user_field_# to the ‘public user custom fields’ site settings; but, disclaimer, I don’t have experience with Discourse , but I can learn it fast enough, just give me a few days if you’d like. I came across some of your posts in that Discourse dev forum; amazing what a site like this can cost every month, and you are providing it to us for free! So, thank you!, @scottfsmith.
It’s up to you, if you get something working let me know and I’ll try to put it in to this site. Note that if you are not familiar with Rails or Ember I found you will need to have a working knowledge of that to start to understand how to put it together.
Re: cost, you might be seeing the costs of hosting which are pretty high. Since I am managing that it is not so bad. And, all that is paid by voluntary donations to the site as well 
Yes. I do that all the time, Aiden. But, like you said . . . that’s on a computer.
I see you are from near Madison, in WI ! Zone 5A.
And that you joined on Feb 2nd!
I even forget where some of the ‘regulars’ are living . . . so I click on their names when I do . . . and get my bearings again.
Sure does make a difference when you know the Zone info, too.
Good suggestion, @FarmGirl-Z6A !
Since most forums are for other things, like computer, software, or internet related. That is a very not standard thing. I myself don’t use this forum software, in part to keep the cost of my web hosting down since it costs more for the type of web host that this forum requires. There has to be a way to include the zone near the name, yet it’s very hard to figure out the code for such a thing.
Some Rails, no Ember. I’ll take my time.
plugin-api.js.es6/ “discourse-plugin” :: api.decorateWidget method seems to be built into discourse? If that’s the case, you wouldn’t need to add any extensions, and just implement the solution in that link w/out worrying about upgrades breaking the customization. From the little I’ve looked through, putting a theme customization as <script>…</script> section in the </header> is the safest way to avoid it breaking from updates. Too many frameworks used in Discourse!
Yes Discourse is quite the labyrinth… I was surprised how much work it was to add such a simple feature.
Let me know if you need anything from me. We should probably take this to PM as I doubt anyone else here cares about the ins and outs of Discourse.