[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #2823: Improve IP Geolocation Results

[Making WordPress.org]

#2823: Improve IP Geolocation Results
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 Reporter:  iandunn  |       Owner:  iandunn
     Type:  defect   |      Status:  accepted
 Priority:  normal   |   Milestone:
Component:  API      |  Resolution:
 Keywords:           |
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Comment (by barry):

 Howdy,

 There are a few problems here:

 1) The ip2location data on WP.org is very very old.
 2) WP.org doesn't have a subscription/license to use the data that I am
 aware of.
 3) I don't think there is any legitimate use case to pass an ip in the
 query string - this just opens up the API to abuse and most likely
 violates the terms/EULA of using this  data.
 4) The query performance is very poor and probably won't scale to the
 volume that we need.  For ip2location specifically we have already solved
 this problem on WordPress.com, so I would suggest looking at the code
 there.  I haven't looked at the geonames code much, but I suspect it
 suffers from similar issues.
 5) We need a way to keep the information always current if we are going to
 use it.  It changes enough on a regular basis that once it's > 60 days old
 it starts becoming noticeably wrong.

 The first problem to solve is #2.   I don't think we really need ipv6
 support yet since the API should always use REMOTE_ADDR and the
 WordPress.org API currently doesn't have any AAAA records.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2823#comment:12>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
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