Forum Display Enhancements - 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

[mfyvie]

Careful there - the forum post you are quoting is 3 years old. From the looks of that site it doesn't appear to be well maintained. The last update was in March, already 4 months old. I used this database because it was free and I didn't have to look too hard to find it. However, if anyone else finds a more reliable source for the database, I can look at switching over to something else. Most of these databases are unfortunately commercial.

[mfyvie]

I've discovered a very minor flaw.

Impact: If a user's IP isn't found in the database, GLA functions will be disabled for that user. For example, they won't be able to see the who's online list. Whenever that person loads any page on the forum, 1 extra query will be executed - for most people that wouldn't be the end of the world, but I have tried to make GLA as efficient as possible.

What you need to do: Download the .zip file again, you do not need to reinstall the whole package, just replace your includes/gla.php file that you uploaded earlier.

Why this happened: People not interested in the programmer's explanation may skip this next part - show's over folks.. When someone's IP address isn't found we write a null value to the session variable. We use isset() to later check if we've already executed the query, but if the null value is written to the database it doesn't come back on the next page load, therefore the isset() we expected to be true is really false. This is solved by writing an unknown entry to the database as ' ' (space character), GLA then trims anything that comes from the session table the first time it loads - effectively nullifying the variable again. Thereore developers can still use isset() before their GLA compatible plugins (to test if GLA is present at all), and != null to test to see if a country has been found.

What if I do nothing? Well it won't be the end of the world, but it might mean that some users (who have IP addresses that aren't in the database) might not be able to use features which rely on GLA. I'd therefore prefer it if everyone replaced their gla.php file - just to ensure no support issues come up in the future.

Who should do this? Anyone who downloaded and installed GLA before the date of this post. Anyone who has installed GLA after the date of this post can safely ignore this whole post!

[mfyvie]

For those of you who run the Proxy RBL on Registration mod, you'll be pleased to know that I've posted some info here on how to make this mod "country aware" using GLA.

[TOGUIMASTER]

Thanks for this ..

[Captain Kirk76]

Thanks for this.
Although it is a bit USA happy. Alot of people seem to get traced to the US. (I.E one of my German members is apparantly in the USA )

[mfyvie]

Originally Posted by Captain Kirk76

Thanks for this.
Although it is a bit USA happy. Alot of people seem to get traced to the US. (I.E one of my German members is apparantly in the USA )

Yes that can happen if the block was original allocated to a US company who then allocated parts of it somewhere else without that being recorded in the database.

If you know of any such errors you can also make a manual modification to the database.

[Captain Kirk76]

If you know of any such errors you can also make a manual modification to the database.

I wouldn't know where to edit the DB to fix the problem, lol

[mfyvie]

Originally Posted by Captain Kirk76

I wouldn't know where to edit the DB to fix the problem, lol

You would if you looked back one page in this thread, specifically post #24. That will give you instructions to manually add IP ranges to the database

[Captain Kirk76]

Okay, thanks

(Also, finally remembered to click installed )

[mfyvie]

I've just finished a verification script which will test many aspects of GLA and report whether they are correct or not. If something is not correct a text box will be displayed explaining how the problem may be resolved.

I believe this should make it much easier for people who install it to be able to verify their installation before asking for support. In fact, the script gives the sort of answers I might give them if they came to this thread for support anyway.

Those of you who already have working GLA installations may be interested to look at the script anyway. It will tell you whether you've installed the flags correctly for ALL of your styles, and if GLA is functioning correctly it will even give you a little search box where you can query any IP address you like to find out the country.

This file is called gla_test.php and is now included in the installation archive. It is designed to be run from your main forum directory, but you could run it from any directory you like. You can either redownload the archive to get this file, or I've attached it to this post with a screenshot. Unfortunately the screenshot gets automatically scaled down, so it may be hard to read.

I hope you all enjoy this test script and find it useful.