Poor accuracy or too few markers in Google Maps

Question:

The Google Maps shown on the Live Statistics page and/or Start Page do not accurately plot listener locations.

or

The Google Maps shown on the Live Statistics page and/or Start Page do not show enough listeners -- there are fewer markers than there are listeners.

Answer:

By default, listener locations are mapped on a per-country basis, so if more than one listener is tuned in from the same country, Centova Cast will plot the map markers for those listeners directly on top of each other, and thus they will appear to be a single marker.

For the same reason, Centova Cast will only ever plot markers in the center of the country, regardless of the city in which the listener is located. For large countries like the USA or Canada, this may result in listeners from a wide geographic area being consolidated down into what appears to be a single icon.

Centova Cast does support more accurate mapping down to the level of individual cities, but this requires a very large city database (~30MB) which is not practical to bundle with the official release of Centova Cast.

If you want to enable per-city mapping, you can download the GeoLite City database from http://www.maxmind.com and put the GeoLiteCity.dat file in /home/centovacast/system/geoip/. This will instantly and automatically enable per-city listener mapping.

NOTE: This article is for Centova Cast v2 only; an alternate version exists for Centova Cast v3.