Unfortunately, the usual way of doing this is by connection to google and enlisting their services. the trouble with google is the complete lack of privacy, something I for one wouldn't be too happy about. Also, in the process you'd have to admit google to the forum, which again for the beforementioned reasons, I would object to.
The alternative would be to manually create a bitmap with the locations of the members tied in. There are some free software packages out there that could be used to create such hotspots with such a bitmap but that's a lot of work, not merely creating it but also the maintenance.
How about people making more extensive use of the location field in their profiles, no google and pretty much the same result. Even better if the forum owner could adapt the search page to accommodate for a location field search.
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