Geolocation Management

The Geolocation Management admin control panel allows administrators to upload a CSV database containing the IP-range to country associations required by FUDforum's geolocation feature.

Uploading the geolocation database

Database Format

Choose the geolocation database type: GeoIP or IP-To-Country.

Data File

The name of the CVS file to upload.

You need to download this file from one of the following locations before uploading it to your forum:

• GeoIP, which can be freely downloaded from http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country; or
• IP-To-Country database freely available from http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/node/view/6.

WARNING: The import process usually takes a few minutes, depending on the file size.

Rebuilding caches

When enabling geolocation functionality on an existing forum, it is recommended that the user and message location caches are rebuilt. Without them, old messages will not have a flag appearing beside them. Please note that this is a SLOW process, which may take a few hours on a large forum.

Possible problems and solutions

No flag shown for a given user

Not all GEOIP databases are up to date and you may need to buy GEOIP data if accuracy and completeness is important to you.

To see why a given user doesn't have a flag next to their name, execute the following query from your forum's SQL Manager (replace user_name with the user's login):

SELECT login, reg_ip, last_known_ip, country
FROM fud30_users u
LEFT JOIN fud30_geoip g 
ON u.last_known_ip between g.ips and g.ipe
WHERE u.login = 'user_name';

File upload failed

Ask your hosting provider to increase the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size settings in php.ini.

Note: I encountered this problem twice, and in both instances my hosts support team resolved the problem in minutes, but they did need to know the size of the file I was attempting to upload, which in the case of Geo-IP is +- 3.72MB.