GLA - Geographic Location Awareness for vBulletin
 

*** Staff note: The author of this modification has passed away in a diving accident. We wish his family all strength in dealing with this traggic issue. ***

GLA - Geographic Location Awareness for vBulletin

What does this do?

GLA adds an additional layer of information into your vBulletin site (visitors' country name). GLA doesn't output anything to the user, or change any display on your forum, it simply adds additional information which is then available to other programs or mods.

But what can I use it for?

There are many applications, but the main idea is that this mod enables other mod writers to very easily add location awareness functions into their own mods. If you were thinking of writing a mod to display a person's registration country in the postbit, it's now very easy to do.

Why should I download and install this?

Unless you are also going to install one of the other mods which requires GLA, there isn't much point. If you are a developer, you might install this to add functionality to your own mods.

How will I update this?

Easy - you can update the database used for matching country names to IP addresses yourself - it's very easy. Full instructions are provided in the install.txt file inside the zip file.

How do I install?

Download the zip file and look for install.txt. But basically it's easy - upload the contents of the upload folder to your forum directory, and import the enclosed .xml file. That's it.

How do I know if it is working?

A test script is provided that will test every aspect of your GLA installation to inform you of any potential problems. Please see the installation instructions for information about this test script.

What about flags?

This includes flags, meaning that other mods won't have to package flags. You can change the flags if you like, instructions are provided.



How about a quick summary of features?

• Fast - GLA adds almost no overhead. This is important for big sites. Only a single query is executed each time a session is created
• Transparent - new variables are automatically available to any part of your site
• Updateable - you can update the database yourself
• Free - a free database is used
• Accurate - the database provider claims 98% accuracy
• Configuration - absolutely nothing to configure for this mod (since it just provides data to other mods)
• Extendible - GLA may encourage other mod developers to add location features. Why not ask the author of your favourite mod to use GLA? Were you thinking of making a mod which uses location data, but didn't know how? GLA solves the problem for you - now all you need to do is read a variable
• Easy developer information - hints and tips are provided with the zip file to make life easier for developers

Is there a list of mods that currently use GLA?



Yes, a list will be maintained here. Please let me know if you find a mod which requires GLA that isn't listed, so I can add it. The current list of GLA mods is as follows:

• Country Display for Who's Online
• Check Proxy RBL on Registration (unsupported, hack for an existing mod)

Before posting on this thread:

Please post on this thread only for issues relating to GLA itself. If you have an issue that concerns a mod that uses GLA, please post on the appropriate thread for that mod. If you have an issue which concerns the underlying functionality of GLA itself, then post here.

Even though this is a required mod from another mod and may be fairly boring, please click install if you are using it. Support requests from people who have not clicked install may not be answered.

No screen shots for this mod, since there's nothing to see.

Version history
1.0 (07.07.07) Initial version

Reserved

Sounds like it could be a useful addition .. thanks mfyvie .. look forward to seeing future mods utilising this hack.
Clicked install thingy :up:

great to add addon like :prevent visitors to register from specific country

Actually that was why I wrote GLA in the first place. However there is a mod that does almost the same thing here. Rather than re-invent the wheel I've sent the author a PM and asked him to consider adding functionality based on GLA, if installed.

Just a suggestion, but it would be very useful to be able to get statistics on what countries our members are from. This helps with targeting and selling ads.

Thanks.

Flawless install.
Many thanks.

Exactly, this system makes it very easy for you (or someone else) to build such a mod, using the variables that GLA provides.

GLA itself doesn't seem to add features by itself, it merely acts as a layer or additional information that other people can use to develop their own template edits or plugins. With your suggestion, it could be as simple as adding a plugin to run after GLA which just logs the country to a flat text file, or adding to the hook which fires after a member logs in could record this information just for members.

I should point out however that webstats packages like awstats already provide this functionality based on your web logs.

I would love to have the country flag in the postbit template.

There's a boatload of requests in the mod requests section for things like that. Maybe people should dig up those requests and add to them saying that it is now really easy for a developer (or anyone really) to make mods like that if they require GLA to be installed.

Hopefully this will inspire someone to write a mod like the one you suggested. I've thought of it too, but am too busy with other mods at the moment.