Most tutvus eestis happens in a few places. The largest groups of adverts on this board name Tartu and Tallinn, with Pärnu, Viljandi, Võru and several of the counties behind them, and a place page beyond the two largest usually holds a handful of adverts.
Where the filter sits
A place filter opens under the header on every list. It offers the places that hold enough adverts to be worth filtering by, and it shows the count beside each one, so you can see before you click whether a town has one advert or fifty. The list is capped, so the smallest places are left out and no entry leads to an empty page.
Clicking a place narrows the list you are already reading. Whether you arrived through a category or through a search such as seks tutvus, the filter applies to what is on screen and keeps you where you are.
What counts as a place
Estonia has two layers of naming and the board handles both. A town name is a place, and so is a county, and the eight counties whose name is also their county town are counted together with the town. Tartumaa and Tartu are one entry, and the same is true of Viljandimaa, Võrumaa, Valgamaa, Pärnumaa, Raplamaa, Põlvamaa and Jõgevamaa. The counties whose name is not their town’s, Harjumaa and Saaremaa among them, keep an entry of their own.
Case and accents do not matter. Tartu, tartu and TARTU all resolve to the same place, and so do Pärnu and Parnu. The short forms people use in adverts are understood as well: trt for Tartu, and tln, talin or tallinn for Tallinn. A poster who wrote that they are in the capital is counted under Tallinn too.
The county problem
An advert that names only a county is telling you the poster has not chosen a town, which usually means they will travel. Where the county name is the same as its town, the advert is counted with the town and appears in that filter. Where it is not, the advert shows under the county, and a reader looking for a town nearby may have to check both entries.
This is worth knowing before concluding that nobody in your area is on the board. A reader looking for Tartu should look at Tartu, and a reader looking for Kuressaare should look at Saaremaa.
Reading a place page
Each place has an address of its own, with /location/ in English and /asukoht/ in Estonian, and the page holds that place’s adverts across every category. That makes a place page the quickest way back to what you were reading, since it can be bookmarked and reopened without setting up the filter again.
The page also carries the advert count for the place in its title, which is a rough measure of how active the area is.
When your town is not there
A place appears once it holds a handful of live adverts, and since adverts expire after ten days a place can drop off the list and come back. If your town is missing, the nearest large entry is usually the one to open, and the county entry beside it is worth checking, since some posters name a region and no town.
Reading the place pages in both languages is also a reasonable habit: the same adverts are listed under /asukoht/ on the Estonian side, and a poster who wrote in Estonian will appear there just as well.
