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Display of the poster's geographical information
53 comments. Current rating: 
(12 votes). Leave comments and/ or rate it.
Over Christmas (Dec 26th, 2006 to be precise) I experimented a little with extracting geographical information from poster's IP numbers.
Yes, I do and have always stored the IP numbers of posters. I think every standard message board software would do that. It makes it a lot easier to administrate the postings, e.g. to move all posts made by a certain person on a certain day to a separate page.
The IP number is stored but never displayed on the site.
The IP number can be used to make a guess where the poster is from. In almost all cases it actually means information on the user's ISP. For example my home IP number is 63.193.xxx.xxx
If you plug this number e.g. 63.193.120.200 - into a web site like 
http://www.ip2location.com/, then you will find out that I am located in San Francisco, California. This is not exact though. My ISP - SBCYahoo DSL - has a hub there. I live about 70 miles south of San Francisco, in a different county.
My thought was that it would be interesting to see where every poster is writing from. So I downloaded the freely available database "MaxMind - GeoLite Country | Open Source IP Address to Country Database" http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country and added it into this site.
I displayed next to each poster the city, state (region) and country where they seemed to be from, together with a little flag.
I did get an email from an unhappy user, who voiced privacy concerns. I had not realized that in some cases, the database could be fairly accurate - in this person's case it had correctly guessed a small town (where he lives in).
So I removed this functionality again.
What do you users think? Would you find it interesting to see geographic information displayed? I could make it an option - like a checkbox
"Yes, display 'xxx' as my geographic information"
Where xxx would be whatever the database suggests. The default should probably be 'unchecked'.
If I get no replies at all, I will not further spend time on this.
when you post, you can now choose to display city and country, or just the country or hide your geographical information alltogether.
Comments:
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I have no problem if you show my geografic info,I think it's just a question of trust to each other.But I wanted to thank you also for the information about maxmind I did not know this site but it was very usefull for me.And a other thing is that if you good at this you find every info you want at the internet
regards Johan | ||
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Go for it Pete! I checked it out and now use it myself. I believe that 75% of the participants already communicate with each other anyways,there will aways be an exception no matter what you try !
Dave | ||
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Hi Peter! Thanks for the site, it is very useful! I am from Lancashire in the U.K. (England) but it shows US! Is this because i am on AOL? When I checked my I.P. on IP2Location yesterday it came up with London! But today it is Reston, Virginia!? It is a good idea to show where contributors are from, considering if it was a scammer from Russia who had infiltrated the site in order to defend their or their colleagues actions!! Dom | ||
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Well you do have the right Country and State, I have no idea exactly where Rockmount is, but it is nowhere at all near where I live.
Lloyd I have no problems with this feature at all,,,,,,there is far too much hiding on the net, that is the domain of scammers! | ||
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Im glad i found these website, thank you and good work
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I know it works because now it show everytime the good city and country
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I live in Naarden, not in Bussum. Bussum is the village next to mine.
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I have no trouble having my location known. I just wish that searching on IP addresses from this woman in Russia would give me some useful info. There are several IP addresses in the header. Some in Germany, one in Spain, and one in Sweden and one came up in the Russian Fed (IP 89.108.87.146).
I have been having correspondance with Natalya Ocinkona (natlady@burummail.net) who says she works in Chita, Russia, but lives in a small village (not on any map i have been able to find) outside of Chita. She says she has never been married and could never love a Russian man and does perfer older men. She is 28 and just 2 weeks younger that my youngest son! She has sent several photos, all very modest. Would I like her to be real? Sure! Do I want to be scamed? NO! She says she only has enough money to pay for Visa and needs $690 US money for a one way ticket to come for a visit. I said she could not come for a visit with a one way ticket. I said I would contact my travel agent and purchase her ticket that way. It would be a round trip and would cost me almost $1000 US. She said no dice, however, I might be able to wire money to the Visa place's bank. I asked what kind of visa she was traveling on and she didn't know. I guess my next call will be to the US State Department, unless someone has any information at all on this woman. HELP! This image was also posted here: Dating scammer Natalya Ocinkona, Polonsky Vsevolod Vladimirovich  Keywords: | ||
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I think this just shows how easy some one can trace you ;o), this is what you could call a bit of public awareness. It makes the public aware of the fact that there is little privacy online
 Keywords: total crap | ||
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yes I am, who are you, and where from /
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Grays is very close about 15 miles. Good bit of work
MAC | ||
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i think that is a pretty neat idea and i would like to learn how to do that if you have nothing to hide it shouldn't be a problem right. anyways i think it's a good idea
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Hi,
Your websites showes Highbury, GB. Pretty close, but I am in Southgate, north London, while Highbury is a bit south from me (also north London) or Highbury in Somerset or Highbury in Gloucestershire or Highbury in City of Portsmouth. Also, it is UK (the state/country) not GB (an island). GB is corect, but since we give name of countries, it should be UK. Kamil | ||
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Don't even know that Sulzbach. Doesn't matter. Kamil, your flag shows UK. That's enough.
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thanks
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