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January 6, 2005

User’s Country Identification

Posted by Sarah King in PHP & Web Development

User’s Country Identification - have I ranted about this before? Probably elsewhere…

I have a pet peeve about visiting sites and even though my primary email is a dotcom my IP address isn’t masked and sites shouldn’t be fooled into thinking I’m american. I frequently get invited to take part in competitions, offers etc and then when I’ve done all the work I find:

• I can’t submit because it won’t recognise my address, post code even if it does allow me to select NZ
• It’s a USA or Canada only thing.

They could have stopped me early on by saying, “hey, you can have a go but it’s only open to locals.”

If the technology wasn’t available I’d have sympathy but it is! Admittedly the database is sizeable but it’s not unreasonable. I use IP checking on my Property Management Software site to control which version of the order form you will get and then default the country in the address section. It’s not foolproof so I give the option to change but it’s a start.

So, if you have anything where a user needs to fill in forms, get filtered data based on geography, try using the users IP address to give them a head start. They’ll appreciate the effort

– I’ve since been put onto geoIP.dat which is a teeny file (relative to the database file) which does the same thing. I’ll be trialling it soon