IP Address Locater

[Rockonmetal]

Rather than list all the countries, their states, and major cities I was wondering how "Safe" using a ip address locater is?
What i'm trying to do is have it so the user does not have to enter their country, state, and city which they live in?
Is it even worth it to do this? Or safe?

[BLiZZaRD]

I wouldn't. With the "cracker and hacker" methods gaining popularity today and tunneling and port mashing and all that as well as proxies and domain piggie backs, you never really know where someone is. If I go to your site and I am tunneling, or piggie backing I may well show up as somewhere in Russia, and then I can't read your site.

Instead what you can do (somehow I don't know off the top of my head) is to have the fields for zip code (or whatever code to identify their whereabouts)first, and when they enter the number the city, state, country are auto filled in based on a database. They have the option to choose if it is wrong or something but if it is not, it will save them the time you were looking for originally.

Just an idea.

[Rockonmetal]

k thanks

[boogyman]

I wouldn't. With the "cracker and hacker" methods gaining popularity today and tunneling and port mashing and all that as well as proxies and domain piggie backs, you never really know where someone is. If I go to your site and I am tunneling, or piggie backing I may well show up as somewhere in Russia, and then I can't read your site.

this shouldn't be a language issue, and if it is then a language bar should be added rather then a zip code tool.



Instead what you can do (somehow I don't know off the top of my head) is to have the fields for zip code (or whatever code to identify their whereabouts)first, and when they enter the number the city, state, country are auto filled in based on a database.

I recently created a zip code tool for a site that I am working on and between just the USA and Canada the zip code table was more then 83mb, and included
post code, city, county, state/province, country, areacode, timezone, utc, dst, latitude, longitude.

to me that wouldn't be worth it to include the rest of the world.
It only takes like a minute or two for the user to enter in his / her data, and what you could do is just save the information to a cookie so that upon return the information can be populated automatically.

safe? I dont really know how unsafe it would be, because you are just using public information that is already available at many sources. as long as you are just trying to get city/province/country/zip? there really is nothing that could be deemed hazardous in my eyes.

[BLiZZaRD]

this shouldn't be a language issue, and if it is then a language bar should be added rather then a zip code tool.


True, but he never said what he wanted to do with the info. Take MSN or hotmail for example. If you sign up and tell them your area is somewhere in Slovakia, then that is the language you get for everything MSN on your PC. Funny.

[boogyman]

that is because they have the languages set up that way. By default their site is set up for English (American) however its possible to change language and stay that way so long as you do not clear your cookies.

I know that its not right to make these such assumptions but providing the language selector is always more accurate then some type of IP LookUp. Although there is alot more that goes into creating a multi-lingual site then an language selector.

[Twey]

It's safe to do use an IP lookup to set defaults. Just make sure the user can change it if it's wrong.

[djr33]

There is an old thread on this subject that does just that.
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15036

[gaspar93]

Rather than list all the countries, their states, and major cities I was wondering how "Safe" using a ip address locater is?
What i'm trying to do is have it so the user does not have to enter their country, state, and city which they live in?
Is it even worth it to do this? Or safe?

Safe? why bother when you can use an external website that won't log users queries. Besides that, the public info about any ip address will be always visible online. I always used this ip lookup (http://www.ipgp.net) tool and never had problems.

[Twey]

That's not quite what was meant by 'safe' here. It was more about accuracy, and the chances that a user will get stuck labelled with the wrong location.