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

[Nick0r]

This is a great idea - I've been looking for something like this so that I can geo-target my newsletter to people in specific countries. I don't suppose there is any planned plugin support for this in the future?

[mfyvie]

Originally Posted by Nick0r

This is a great idea - I've been looking for something like this so that I can geo-target my newsletter to people in specific countries. I don't suppose there is any planned plugin support for this in the future?

Well this module will support any such application you'd like to build with it. It depends what you mean by "plugin support" - the support for a plugin is there, but someone still has to write it - this mod simply takes a lot of the hard work out of writing such a plugin.

Are you talking about the "Generate Mailing List" function in the admincp? If so, you should be aware that the file that makes these mailing lists has no hooks at all, so such a modification would have to involve file edits, not plugins.

Version 1.1 of GLA will make it even easier for developers to write code in the own plugins, for example - you could take the registration IP address and pass it through a function and have the country data returned. Only 2 lines of code needed to test any IP address.

[Nick0r]

Hey,

I was thinking more along the lines of integration w/ Commbull or VBGazette (newsletter products).

[mfyvie]

If those products could import data from another source, it would be fairly easy. All you'd need is a bit of code that spits out your usertable, or specifically the email address, registration ip, and username and adds the country name at the same time. You could then import the data into excel and do whatever you wanted with it.

[Cyburbia]

Free IP to country database (CSV) that claims daily updates.
http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl

[mfyvie]

Originally Posted by Cyburbia

Free IP to country database (CSV) that claims daily updates.
http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl

That is awesome, thanks for that. The timing is excellent as I am getting version 1.1 ready. This database looks much better than the one I am using in 1.0, and they seem to certainly try to keep it up-to-date!

There are extra country codes used however, meaning that there could be some issues with flags not being available.

I'm also thinking about things like a cron job for auto downloads and updates each week, as well as a list of exceptions, for the case for example when some of your users post from a company where the proxy server is in one country, but assigned to the address space of the head office (e.g. USA).

The accuracy issue will become even more important when I release the flag in the postbit mod that I've just finished writing.

[mfyvie]

I've attached an updated database file, which I reformatted from software77.net (see above post for details). Future versions of GLA will support this file format without modifications, but for the moment I had to make a custom version so that 1.0 would import it.

I believe that this database should be better than the one which is currently bundled with GLA 1.0. I'd be interested to hear comments from people who reported some problems with the existing database - maybe this updated one improves the situation?

How to upgrade your database? Easy, just follow the upgrade instructions in the original install.txt file included with the GLA zip file. Updating should take less than a minute.

I'm also going to need a bit of help from you guys. There are new country codes added to this version of the database, namely these countries:
AP - non-specific Asia-Pacific location
CS - Serbia and Montenegro (Formally Czechoslovakia)
YU - Serbia and Montenegro (Formally Yugoslavia) (Being phased out)
EU - non-specific European Union location
FX - France, Metropolitan
PS - Palestinian Territory, Occupied
UK - United Kingdom (standard says GB)
* ZZ - IETF RESERVED address space.

I need some assistance from other people for the following tasks:

• Check if the existing flag set contains all flags in the ISO-3166 list (in other words, are there other countries missing from the current flag set?)
• Check that the current flagset actually represents the flags of the country codes (some flags may have changed)
• Draw (or copy and adapt) any new flags missing from the current flag set, and possibly extend the flag sets linked here.

The idea would then be to put these extended flag sets up for download at software77.net to allow everyone using their free database (not just GLA users) the chance to get flags to match the most current database. If you enjoy GLA and think it is useful, I'd be grateful if you could help me out with any of the above tasks.

[Cyburbia]

There's a very tasteful flag set at http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ . It incldes all the missing countries, although users will probably need to rename europeanunion.png to eu.png, and make a copy of uk.png as gb.png.

[mfyvie]

Nice link! Flags look good, but for the default set (packaged with GLA) I really need something to match the size (height) of the current set. The reason is that the height of the flags matches the various IM icons displayed in the postbit, so it looks good. It also doesn't look too bad when stacked next to text in the default size.

[bada_bing]

This would be a nice addition if Stonyack updates the vbgoogle hacks