location detection in a forum

They have: 5,633 posts

Joined: Jan 1970

Hi,
ın case we open within our association's website, can we detect from which country a visitor is posting or is just entering the forum to read?
Anyone who could answer?
THX

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Hi, Simplemind -- this particular forum (Forum Related Discussion and Annoucements) is for our forums, only. Your question would fall into the Server-Side of things, so I'm going to move it there.

The quick answer is yes, you can detect that information. I don't know the details, but it's part of reading the IP address and the ISPs location, I think.

Hopefully someone else will be able to answer you shortly.

druagord's picture

He has: 335 posts

Joined: May 2003

if your run apache as your webserver you can install mod_geoip the free version is going to give info about the country.the pay version can go into more details. but those system are limited (AOL will give wrong results)

IF , ELSE , WHILE isn't that what life is all about

Mark Hensler's picture

He has: 4,048 posts

Joined: Aug 2000

A-O-H3LL uses proxies. So you can't dig any information out of them. Heck, if a user goes to your site, their IP will change between pages. That's some mesed up system AOL has.

Aaaanyway. Besides Evil Empire Number Two...
You can use this data (link) to perform a location lookup on an IP. You'll need to write your own interface to the data or find one on the 'net.

I looked into this a few weeks/months ago for a project I was working on, but never got to the point of implementation.

Currently, my project uses a more complex but less accurate method to detect the user's country by examining the language settings of the client.

Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.

They have: 447 posts

Joined: Oct 1999

Mark Hensler wrote: A-O-H3LL uses proxies. So you can't dig any information out of them. Heck, if a user goes to your site, their IP will change between pages. That's some mesed up system AOL has.

yeah i found that out when i tried generating a session hash based on useragent/remoteaddr and got complaints aolers couldnt log in. i had to sign up for a free account to figure out what was going on. just plain retarded imo.

it's not easy to cancel your free account either.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

ROB wrote: it's not easy to cancel your free account either.

No joke. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get untangled. I would call, quote the reference number, they'd say, all cancelled. Then I'd get a bill.

So I'd call, they'd say, oh, sorry, don't worry about the bill, you're cancelled now. And then I'd get another bill.

I think that's how they keep customers, frankly.

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