@dale, you are probably right; this is probably only a temporarily-enabled feature designed to help the community while its size is small, just as we requested. If it's only temporary and the location identifiers in chat will not be shown permanently anywhere in the game it's just wasted effort to change it right now. If the location will be shown in society/corporation chat down the road though, it would be nice to eventually see shorter location names and have the option to turn them off.
@Cuey, if playing in windowed mode you can always see what your location will be shown as by looking at the window's title - though I'm not sure if this is true while accessing terminals (Edit: I just checked and it shows this too). For example if you're in Saransk you'll see "AfterWorld Survival [v. C220] - Saransk" at the top of the game window, but if you're not in any town I'm pretty sure you always see "AfterWorld Survival [v. C220] - Unrecognized location," meaning your name in local chat will say "Cuey (Unknown)." The "Unrecognized" and "Unknown" location is shown as a blank location on the forums... for now. We don't yet know if any of this will change, of course - unless someone remembers a dev quote saying it would or could change.
