User Geolocation Restriction

[[R] NuclearGeneral]

User Geolocation Restriction v1.0.0

 

User Geolocation Restriction (henceforth UGR) is an advanced tool that offers additional spam prevention functionality to 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 at least accepting the registration but automatically banning them for future review, or even, as an extreme measure, denying access to them is by itself a very effective way to almost completely counterfeit spamming. 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. Of course an admin may lose some legitimate members who originate from those countries (should they opt to completely deny registration), but there are admins who will gladly make this sacrifice for the sake of a spam-free community. For those admins who don't want to make such a sacrifice there is the option to permit registrations from blacklisted locations, but ban the member automatically.

 

UGR works in the following way: Upon a visitor's visit or attempt to register an account to your community, the app locates their IP, and according to the way you have set it up, it can deny access to them, or deny their registration request, or accept the request and ban the member for future review. 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 to deal with undetermined IPs, 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 integrates effectively with your Members section in your ACP, adding a neat hover card 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, longitude, 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.

 

Some interesting stats taken from my community where UGR runs since March 2012 until today (November 20, 2012):

• Total spammer registrations prevented: 102,664
  
• Top 15 spammer countries - Number of spammer registrations prevented:
  
  • China - 26,955
    
  • United States - 16,510
    
  • Russian Federation - 13,590
    
  • Ukraine - 11,994
    
  • Poland - 4,607
    
  • France - 3,922
    
  • Germany - 3,294
    
  • Sweden - 3,288
    
  • United Kingdom - 2,526
    
  • Netherlands - 2,147
    
  • Thailand - 1,997
    
  • Romania - 905
    
  • Moldova, Republic of - 828
    
  • Korea, Republic of - 747
    
  • Turkey - 682
    

Disclaimer: My certainty about the legitimacy of the above numbers comes from the fact that my community is 100% Greek spoken, so I doubt any member coming from those countries wanted to become an active member of it for any reason other than for spamming.

 

Important: Purchasing this application grants you the permission to use it in one community. If you want to use it in additional communities, you will have to purchase additional licenses.

 

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.

 

View the full article at IPS Resources