HostIP.info not working

And that’s why the checkbox to confirm is there. JUST in the case where the only 100% GPL compat lookup failed.

If there’s another API to use, I’d love to add it, but there were questions about then others :/

Ah.. I don’t seem to get the checkbox because I’m using the Buy Now approach… I might look into that further.

Leaving that aside for the moment, I’ve been looking at what some of the other plugins do to detect location:

One plugin I found uses ip-api.com (eg https://ip-api.com/php/176.35.77.154), which was looking promising – but they do not allow commercial use without prior approval, so no good for an EDD extension (though the plugin using it is a WooCommerce extension!).

There are a series of plugins by IP2Location that bundle their Lite DB (https://lite.ip2location.com/), which is free for personal or commercial use with attribution required (so presumably not a GPL compliant approach).

There’s one plugin which works with GeoIP2, but which doesn’t bundle it (you need to download yourself), which is very similar to what EDD Prevent EU Checkout does. The free MaxMind libraries are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, so not compatible and can’t be bundled, which is why I guess it’s up to the user to download themselves, right?

And I have a plugin that uses the IP2C library (https://firestats.cc/wiki/ip2c), released under GPLv2. That library bundles the Webhosting.info database. The Webhosting.info domain seems to be dead now and the database bundled with IP2C hasn’t been updated since December 2012, so it’s probably too stale/dead to use. I presume the license of the database was compatible with the GPL as it was bundled in a GPL library, but don’t know 100% for sure in hindsight.

The IP2C library also supports the database from https://software77.net/geo-ip/, which does appear to be updated. That used to be GPLv3, but they switched to ‘Donationware’. They link to Wikipedia’s definition of Donationware which says “Since donationware comes fully operational (i.e. not crippleware) when payment is optional, it is a type of freeware.” Any idea how that stands in relation to the GPL?

I have 2 reasons for asking: 1) if it’s GPL compatible, I might switch to that for my plugin and 2) potentially IP2C and this DB could be bundled with this EDD Prevent EU Checkouts, so it works out of the box. I could probably help with the implementation if you want. Of course, totally understand if you don’t want to add it as it makes things complicated with keeping the DB up to date, etc (or if we can’t work out whether it is compatible or not – that’s stumped me).

Anyway, no really great GPL compliant option (that I can see) apart from that. Of course, it’s not the end of the world to leave it up to the user to set up the GeoIP database. Perhaps I’m over-thinking it! ??

Hi Mika,

Now we are into Jan 2015 I can see that the plugin does not seem to block EU visitors at all. We just had someone in Germany try and they were not blocked.

The site is https://abwoon.org/online-store/audio-downloads/

Any idea what I may have done wrong?

Stephen – And you have seen my headache.

GeoIP2 is not usable in the plugin and it’s a rigamarole to hook into it … I heistate on. However I am going to have to look into that I think. “If you want to use the GeoIP2, install it here…” so I’ll bang on that today.

IP2C .. That I can add actually.

I’ve also been looking into adding the Wikimedia IP check – see https://github.com/Ipstenu/edd-prevent-eu-checkout/tree/REL_1.0.5

ChrisCG – Host.info isn’t 100% perfect, so if they were not blocked AND they checked the box to say they were outside the EU, then they broke the law (yay) not you. Can’t fix everything, which is why I put the checkbox there.

Thanks, Mika,

Though I am puzzled – are you saying that the whole plugin is not working to block anyone anywhere in the EU – because the Host.info is what you used and that isn’t working?

So the plugin is effectively useless at the moment? (apart from the self-declared tick box, I mean)

Host.info is not 100% accurate. That doesn’t mean it’s not working, it means SOMETIMES it doesn’t work, so the failsafe of the checkbox is there to help.

There is no 100% accurate, GPLv2 (or later), way to determine location. There just isn’t.

Hi Mika,

Thanks again. I’m just being a bit thick – I have no history of % success/fail with my site, as it’s only the 2nd day of operation and no ‘real’ sales yet – so I’d hoped you could give me a rough idea of how likely it is that the plugin will detect an address correctly?

I just thought it sounded like you had found that it was not working at all – clearly you believe it will work most of the time – maybe 95% of the time?

I do think it works most of the time, which is … really the best I can do here.

BUT I’m nearly done with a new version that will do this:

1. Check if you have GeoIP installed via PHP (IMO – this is the best option)
2. Check if you installed the GeoIP DBs manually in the right location
3. Assuming 1 & 2 are failures, use hostip
4. If HostIP can’t find you, check with WikiMedia’s tool
5. If THAT happens and you come back as either XX (hostip) or null (wikimedia), then BUY NOW is disabled (that’s for you, Stephen)

It’s not perfect. But then again, neither is this daffy EU law :/

That’s a lot of attempts to find the address – I agree you can’t do much better, under the circumstances.

When you say at the end it disables the BUY NOW button, is that in the scenario where you haven’t been able to tell where the customer is located, so it’s not safe to sell to them in case they *are* in the EU (even though they could be in the US, for example) so, to fail safe, you block the sale anyway?

If so, is it possible to allow the user to add an alternative code snippet at that point, which redirects the customer to another site (such as Payhip https://payhip.com/, or Digitalgoodsstore https://www.digitalgoodsstore.com/) so that the customer can at least buy the file, albeit at a platform that charges the vendor a commission?

When you say at the end it disables the BUY NOW button, is that in the scenario where you haven’t been able to tell where the customer is located, so it’s not safe to sell to them in case they *are* in the EU (even though they could be in the US, for example) so, to fail safe, you block the sale anyway?

Possibly… It’s a lot of if/then checks is all. Right now, I’m manually putting in ‘buttons’ for alternate purchase methods (amazon etc) on each download page. Which sucks, but it’s the most control I’ve got.

Right now, it makes the button for “Buy Now” read “purchase unavailable” while keeping the “Add to Cart” buttons fully function. The logic being “Hey, I can’t tell if I can let you buy now!” since that button skips over the normal checkout stuff.

I see (I think!)

It is hard to make it look pretty, isn’t it?

So – manually adding buttons – is that by adding button code at the end of the product description? So there ends up being two buttons visible – the manually-inserted one and the EDD Purchase button (which may or may not be disabled, depending on the action of the IP check)?

So that would need some instructions before the buttons to explain why there is a choice of two buttons, and emphasising that they should use the second one if it’s working… hmmm, nice ??

You can imagine what we in the UK think of the masterminds in the EU Commission….

In non-html:

[Buy from Me]
[Buy from Amazon]
[Buy from Apple]

And then a link below “Where should I buy from?”

Since I’m manually inserting the product button, I can just make shortcodes for [edd-off-buy store="apple" link="https://apple.com/foo"] and line ’em up one after the other in the appropriate place on my site.

Which I suppose I should document on my blog one day…

Sounds wonderful, Mika! (Though you’re starting to lose me…)

I look forward to reading the documentation when you have it ready!

Thanks for putting so much time into this – it could help some of us a lot ??

Hi Mika,

I haven’t had time to set up GeoIP yet, but thought I’d give it a try as is. Unfortunately, there’s a problem – it returns the country of the server rather than that of the visitor.

If I visit geoiplookup.wikimedia.org directly, it tells me I’m here in Brisbane, Australia. But if I echo what comes back from the plugin’s call to the same address, it tells me I’m in Provo and gives me a Hostgator IP address (yes, still with Hostgator for this site and yes I echoed on a live site).

When I proxy into the UK, direct access picks that up, but the plugin’s call to Wikimedia still thinks I’m in Provo.

I had a real quick look and couldn’t see anyway to pass the IP address to Wikimedia’s service. Hope you have some more info on that – otherwise it’s probably of no use.

Cheers,
Stephen

When I was running it for tests, I had it outputting the GEO line, and it was coming back with the right calls. Dang. It was working.

I’ll fuss with that again, or possibly yank it out. It’s been weird, and slow at times.

Looping back to GPL/Donationware, the only answer I found was Joomla not allowing it in their plugins (extensions) so I would lean towards caution and not include it.

https://freegeoip.net/ is still down ??