My members can choose from a list of countries.
The A-Z lists starts at Afghanistan, and goes through many obscure countries.
Should I get the top ten countries and "quick-list" them at the top of the list?
Or is this seen as some sort of cultural superiority yadda yadda?
I'm using PHP/MySQL (trying to get a programming angle there)
You may track the list of most picked countries from your list and put them in the beginning of your list. After this sublist add line and then ordered list of the rest of the countries.
After some time you may remove the logic and 'freeze' the sublist of n 'most popular' countries
I think it makes it harder to find your country. Germany is (I think) one of those top 10 countries and I always have the problem that I don't know what to search for. Search at the top, search for Germany, search for Deutschland,... I think the easiest is alphabetically ordered countries. If the List is very long you may start typing the first letter to get next to your country.
I can also recommend using the country names in the language that your site displays. I am always annoyed by a country list on an English website that uses "Deutschland" for Germany. When I am on an English website, I am intuitively looking for the English country name.
Personally, I don't like it. I'd prefer that countries were just listed alphabetically instead of "United States, Canada, Afghanistan, ..."
Perhaps if you know that 95% of your traffic is coming from one particular country then it might be defensible.
Another solution is to have the list only show countries that have been given as answers in the past, plus an "Other" option that expands the list (or shows a second list) with the full set.
Thus, if you've never had a visitor from, say, Kyrgyzstan, it wouldn't appear in the list at all. The first time a Kyrgyzstani user comes to the site, they'd choose "Other" on the list, and only then would you show the full list. After that, though, since Kyrgyzstan had been answered, you would show it in the initial list. (The threshold for that doesn't have to be 1 ... it can be any number you like, and you'd want to set it so that on balance, many more people are helped by the omission than are hurt by having to choose "Other".)
You could also include a population (or internet-using population) metric and automatically show all countries above a certain size, so the big ones like Germany would be included even before their first users start showing up. Or, if you know you'll have a lot of users from certain countries, for whatever reason, you can have a list of countries that are manually included as well.
Overall: don't underestimate the benefit you'll get by trimming down the list. It's little things like that that make a user interface "great" rather than "ok".
An interesting question. I too have been wondering about this usability issue many times. Why not create a category call continent and users would visit a continent before selecting a country of his/her choice? Would it make it faster (or more convenient) for the users? Of course your list would now need to be level deep. Or with Ajax, this allows many opportunities for some new innovative usability ideas.
Why not keep the list intact, but pre-select the country your visitor is in using geolocation?
Determine the user's physical location based on their IP address.
You can get started at http://www.ip2location.com/, but there are other free choices out there.
Do a Google search for city from "ip address", or country from "ip address".
Be aware that there are some physical divisions that are not apparent if you select a simple country. For example, the country France includes the French Caribbean, and if you are calculating port, you could be thrown off.
Apart from using geolocation, it is important to use the same list (and it is the same standardized list) used by Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. To see it, just go start ordering a product on Amazon and change your shipping address country.
The reason is that people who live in a given country are already used to selecting their country from this particular list, and know how to do it quickly. Any modifications that you make to the list, while well-meaning, will just slow them down.
Remember, people spend 99.99% of their time at other web sites. They know how to be efficient using the tools they've already come across. You should emulate those other sites whenever there is a standard way of doing things -- anything else will confuse your users.