User Geolocation Restriction

[[R] NuclearGeneral]

UGR is an advanced tool that offers additional spam prevention functionality to the ACP of your Community focusing directly on your members' location. It is no secret that the vast majority of spammers originate from a handful of countries. Denying member registration to visitors from those countries (or as an extreme measure completely denying access to them) is by itself a very effective way to almost completely counterfeit spamming. Of course one may lose some legitimate members originating from those countries, but there are admins who will be ready to make this sacrifice for the sake of a spam-free community. So, UGR does exactly this: It allows you to control what locations (countries) are permitted to access your board and/or register an account to it.

 

UGR works in the following way: Upon a visitor's visit to your community or attempt to register an account to it, the app locates their IP, and according to the way you have set it up, it can completely deny access to them, or deny their registration request. In the unfortunate event that their IP cannot be located (less than 0,001% probability for this situation), their IP is characterized as undetermined and, again, according to the way you have set the app, they can be allowed or denied access and/or registration to your community.

Additionally, UGR offers geolocation statistics right into your ACP. Simply visit the Overview page of the app, and you will find a pie chart showing the percentage of each location your members originate from. Moreover, you can find statistics about the number of access and registrations prevented from each location of your Blacklist; therefore you get useful details to further adjust and fine-tune your Blacklist by adding or removing countries to it.

 

Finally, UGR also integrates effectively with your Members section in your ACP, adding a neat hovercard for your members' IP addresses in all four locations where their IP is displayed (single member view, members list, incomplete members list, validating members list), where you can find additional info besides their country, such as city, ISP, longtitude, latitude, etc. Last, but not least, Members Search form is also extended, adding search criteria based on members' location, allowing you to search members from blacklisted, whitelisted, undetermined (where an IP's location cannot be determined), undiscovered (after you run once the Discover Locations tool, this will return no results) locations.

 

Caution: If you install this app to an IP.Board v3.2.3 (it may exist in earlier versions as well) and due to a known and reported bug, you will need to make one file edit to fix the bug before the AJAXed Member Search form in ACP can be extended with the geolocation criteria added by the app. The fix, however, is very easy to apply and is included in the bug report mentioned earlier.

 

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