Download: User Geolocation Restriction

[PrinceOfAbyss]

File Name: User Geolocation Restriction
File Submitter: PrinceOfAbyss
File Submitted: 03 Mar 2012
File Category: Applications

N/A

Click here to download this file

[AndyF]

Just as a note, please be aware you will probably not be able to perform the bugfix edit on a hosted community due to the file encoding.

[wmarcy]

I would love to buy this, but am concerned with a vital function of it, the backend IP database not being on my own servers. Are you able to provide the IP Database and the code changes to the source files to use same on my own servers?

[PrinceOfAbyss]

Hello.

The IP database is a paid service I bought from a website. The database itself however is hosted on my own server (they email me the monthly updates and I install them to the relevant tables). Anyway, since it's a paid service (and an expensive one I admit), I can't share it with anyone.

[PrinceOfAbyss]

I added the option in the settings to allow registration from blacklisted and undetermined locations, and automatically ban the member for future review.

This way the application behaves less radically for admins worrying about member lose.

[JahLion]

very nice but can't afford it after the exchange this will cost me close to $40

[PrinceOfAbyss]

I have this app running since the 7th of March on my live community and it has saved me from the following spammers:

7 from Argentina
17 from Belarus
10 from Brazil
7 from Cambodia
3 from Canada
180 from China
11 from Colombia
39 from France
10 from Georgia
225 from Germany
10 from Indonesia
7 from Ireland
16 from Israel
2 from Italy
2 from Japan
3 from Kazakhstan
27 from Korea, Republic of
26 from Latvia
2 from Malaysia
13 from Moldova, Republic of
1 from Mongolia
9 from Netherlands
114 from Poland
3 from Romania
150 from Russian Federation
7 from Singapore
48 from Sweden
183 from Thailand
3 from Turkey
391 from Ukraine
35 from United Kingdom
315 from United States

A total of 1876 spam registrations.

Finally, after reCAPTCHA was broken I have Email Validation enabled again... I had to set it to Email then Admin Validation to save my community from spammers...

[zatzllc]

I posted this in the review but ---


This is a terrific app which has saved me a tremendous amount of work. We now allow visitors but ban new registrations from countries that have a 10,000:1 spammer:real ratio (for us): China, Ukraine, Russian Federation. It has in one week blocked 300 bad registrations missed by stopforumspam and IPB, many of which are obviously spam. (At this point we're at around 4,000 blocked registrations. I'm assuming it's counting from the first app and not from confirmation.)

My requests:

1) Put both country and city into the database, we often need to know the cities people come from (when events come up that we need a local person to look at)

2) Allow searches by country and city in the members database, not just searches by blacklisted or whitelisted countries -- that makes it easier to figure out whether individual countries should be blocked. (Russia and China are obvious, Ukraine was not, nor would I have thought we'd have legit. users from Czechoslovakia, but we do.)

3) Have a "catch up" feature which would first do an SQL search for members with blank countries, then try to fill them in, instead of having to restart from zero each time.

4) Figure out why 10% of our users, despite having an IP address, aren't being geotagged at all -- I'm guessing there are two IP address fields, original and most recent, and it only pulls from most recent, but if that's missing it should go back to original. (I don't know where "most recent" is pulled from.)

I do love this app and it was WELL worth the money.

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[PrinceOfAbyss]

Sorry for not answering the review in the file directly but although I'm subscribed to it, the system doesn't notify me about new reviews (obviously it's not programmed to). Also, thanks about your good words! :D I'm glad you liked the app, as I've put a great amount of thinking and work on it.

So, about your requests:

1. Have you discovered the popup that appears on hover over the member's IP in ACP? There, you can see any available info about the member's origin. Of course adding the city in the DB is also possible, but I wanted it to be as less "intrusive" to the stock layout as possible.

2. This is indeed doable, I just didn't find a reason to include that. Can you elaborate on how member search by city could help you determine what other countries would need to be blocked? I mean, if you come across a lot of spammers coming ie. from India (which you know how to figure out, don't you?), you can also block India.

3. That is indeed a characteristic that bothered me a LOT before deciding how to implement. Whether I should just fill the empty countries, or rescan the whole members table. So, I chose the latter to have the most updated country of origin for our members (one could move to another country etc...). It's a little resource intensive to rescan the whole table, but other than those 5-10mins, there is no other problem doing so. I could use a setting in the next version to specify what kind of discovery someone wants.

4. Undiscovered IPs are because of two reasons.
First, they may be old members from a time you were using another forum platform. Those members, when you moved to IPB (if that's your case, at least mine is) got the "loopback" IP 127.0.0.1 during the conversion. Now, if those members haven't come again to your forum, they still hold that IP address, which of course isn't discoverable. FYI, I have about 650 old members from back to 2003-5 when we were using phpBB that haven't logged in after we moved to IPB (not because we moved to IPB :P they just disappeared). So, for them the app shows in the chart 16% undiscoverable IPs, which in fact are just the 127.0.0.1 You can see what IPs are treated as undiscovered in your community by running this query:

SELECT * FROM ibf_members WHERE geolocation_country='N/A' ORDER BY ip_address ASC

The other reason an IP may show as undiscoverable is because it wasn't geotagged by the provider of the IP location service for any reason. This is very rare to be honest, as they update and email me their database every month, which then I upload to the server I have installed this IP lookup service on. Again, FYI truly undiscoverable IPs, I have only 3 in my community, which I guess in a next DB update, will again be discovered. And that's also a reason I chose to rescan all members rather than fill only the gaps.

[PrinceOfAbyss]

If you want to get an idea about other countries you could block, here is the result of the query SELECT * FROM ibf_geolocation_countries WHERE registration<>0 ORDER BY registration DESC I just ran on my community.

Ah, before I give you the results, let me tell you that my community is in Greek, so 99,99% of my members should be Greeks. Therefore it was quite safe for me to blacklist ANY other country but Greece. The results are apocalyptic...

CN China 0 8879
US United States 0 5722
UA Ukraine 0 4623
RU Russian Federation 0 4209
DE Germany 0 2218
TH Thailand 0 1397
PL Poland 0 1385
FR France 0 1048
GB United Kingdom 0 847
SE Sweden 0 784
NL Netherlands 0 676
MD Moldova, Republic of 0 355
BR Brazil 0 275
LV Latvia 0 243
BY Belarus 0 206
TR Turkey 0 187
KR Korea, Republic of 0 178
RO Romania 0 158
ID Indonesia 0 129
CO Colombia 0 100
NG Nigeria 0 95
GE Georgia 0 94
IL Israel 0 92
CA Canada 0 88
VN Vietnam 0 81
TW Taiwan 0 75
IN India 0 65
JP Japan 0 57
GA Gabon 0 43
SG Singapore 0 36
IT Italy 0 32
AL Albania 0 32
HK Hong Kong 0 31
CZ Czech Republic 0 30
SA Saudi Arabia 0 28
LT Lithuania 0 26
NZ New Zealand 0 26
A1 Anonymous Proxy 0 24
AR Argentina 0 24
IR Iran, Islamic Republic of 0 21
ES Spain 0 21
VE Venezuela 0 20
IE Ireland 0 19
ZA South Africa 0 18
PH Philippines 0 18
AE United Arab Emirates 0 17
KE Kenya 0 16
MX Mexico 0 14
PT Portugal 0 13
CH Switzerland 0 13
KZ Kazakhstan 0 12
KH Cambodia 0 10
FI Finland 0 10
PK Pakistan 0 9
EG Egypt 0 8
LU Luxembourg 0 8
MN Mongolia 0 8
MY Malaysia 0 8
HU Hungary 0 7
DO Dominican Republic 0 7
BN Brunei Darussalam 0 7
RW Rwanda 0 7
RS Serbia 0 6
MK Macedonia 0 5
BE Belgium 0 5
AM Armenia 0 5
SK Slovakia 0 5
ZW Zimbabwe 0 5
EU Europe 0 4
DK Denmark 0 4
DZ Algeria 0 3
CL Chile 0 3
BG Bulgaria 0 3
NO Norway 0 3
JO Jordan 0 3
SC Seychelles 0 2
N/A <#UNDETERMINED#> 0 2
PE Peru 0 2
IS Iceland 0 1
KW Kuwait 0 1

Can you imagine that USA is the No#2 spammer (at least for me) ? :P So, judging from the list above, and depending on your community's language of course, you could safely blacklist the first 20 countries from the list above (OK, excluding USA).

[kysil]

Hello!
How now do I access my IP Lookup API?
My ID http://community.inv...er/148636-kysil ?
I am getting ERROR: 2043

[kysil]

It does not work. TOR network passes to cheers!

[PrinceOfAbyss]

Your ID is simply 148636 :)

Follow the link in your ACP and simply fill in that ID in the form! :)

[kysil]

Your ID is simply 148636 :)

Follow the link in your ACP and simply fill in that ID in the form! :)

:) Great!!! :)

Thank You!!!

[kysil]

Now wonder. What will happen now will go and make search indexing bots?

[Millipede]

Thank you very much for the sale price this week! :smile: However, it still shows at $20 if I click "Buy"?

[wmarcy]

Trying to buy it, but paypal is saying the invoice has already been paid and not allowing it to be purchased.

Help me out here.

[Millipede]

Any help with the discount price not showing please? It still shows as $20 in PayPal too?

[PrinceOfAbyss]

Oh my God. I got unsubscribed from this topic. How many replies have I lost... How did I get unsubscribed...?

@Millipede, $20 is the reduced price. ;) Before the discount, it was $30.

@wmarcy, what was the problem with Paypal?

[wmarcy]

It was giving me an error, which said: "Invoice already paid, see merchant for details".

It did this for three days, then, it allowed the purchase.

[Millipede]

Ooh, silly me, re the price! Sorry about that :blush: Anyway, I'll be off to get it later, before the discount goes! :smile:

I keep seeing some people on the forums here (mostly devs...) asking how come they got unsubscribed from notifications.... I think I also saw someone say it had something to do with some recent upgrade? I know some of my notification settings got changed in my own forum in the upgrade to 3.3.4 the other day...

[PatrickRQ]

any chance for integration with IP.Download and IP.nexus?

I wouldn't wish to block whole localization from accessing my community, I would just want to restrict specified localizations from purchasing specified packages from IP.Nexus or downloading specified files from IP.Download.

[Copperman]

Sorry for my inexperience. Is there a file showing how to install this? I have uploaded all the files and there are several xml files in the Hooks folder. Do I have to install them one at a time? Thanks.

[PrinceOfAbyss]

Hi.

There is a readme.html in the package! :)

[Copperman]

Thanks for the quick response! Yes, I read that. But unless im missing it all I see in the file are screens showing what it looks like once its installed. Nothing about how to install the hook.