Mismatch between user interface and subscription boundaries

[jszwedko]

When creating a subscription, the user is shown a circle with a radius equal to the distance they specify, but when creating the subscription the bounding box of the displayed circle is used. While unlikely, I believe this could lead to confusion as people receive notifications for an area outside of what they may have thought they were signing up for.

I imagine this decision was made due to the lack of support of a circle feature in GeoJSON.

I personally see two options for increasing clarity:

• Approximating the circle with a polygon with a high number of sides. Having limited experience with PostgresSQL's GIS support, I'm not sure what implications this has for calculating intersections, but my gut feels that it'd probably increase the computations required.
• Display a rectangle rather than a circle on the map when the user is registering

I was curious what people think or if there a reason the current design was chosen. I poked around, but couldn't determine if there was a rationale for the current mismatch. If nothing else, I figured this issue could serve as a record 😄

[bigfleet]

@invisiblefunnel does this sound familiar to you?

[invisiblefunnel]

I imagine this decision was made due to the lack of support of a circle feature in GeoJSON.

Ya, I think that was the reason.

An alternative is to store the center point and radius, then use ST_DWithin to find actionable events. Backfilling existing subscriptions could also be done with a little bit of PostGIS magic.