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Ignoring geolocation Quick Rule for US,CA
Ignoring geolocation Quick Rule for US,CA
Hello,
We are in need of some help with issues of occasional false negatives (?) for a geolocation quick rule we have set up.
We have a Quick Rule to ignore the rule if it's from "us,ca". I have tested this with a VPN to spoof the IP and it works as intended - US and CA IPs will show the site as normal, any other countries will show a special page we have set up to confirm which site they want to visit (US or international).
However we have received reports lately of visitors that will still see the special page even though they are from the US or CA.
Any advice on how to troubleshoot and fixing this bug would be appreciated.
Thank you!
EDIT: Some of our targeted users do block cookies and we are setting a session variable, would this cause the problem? I've also confirmed they're using a US IP.
Re: Ignoring geolocation Quick Rule for US,CA
Hi,
there are a couple of things I can think of:
1 - the MaxMind databases are not 100% accurate even on a country level. Therefore it's possible that you just have to put up with a few false classifications.
2 - update the databases each month to ensure you have the freshest data. (use the button in the back end). I have seen this fix problems like your one.
3 - the current setup in Chameleon does not detect country for IPv6 addresses. I am working on an update which will use the updated MaxMind databases which can do IPv6. Unfortunately it's not completely straightforward and I don't want this to break existing installations so it's taking a while to get right. I'm hoping for a release by the end of September.
Would you be able to track down any of the people who got mis-categorised and find out their IP addresses? You may be able to do that directly if you know them, or if you can find out exactly when they connected to the site you may be able to find them in the web server logs. Then get their IP address from the logs or from them directly, and see if it's an IPv4 or 6 address. If it's IPv4 you can test it at MaxMind.com to see what country it thinks it is and that might help track it down.
I'll be interested to know what you come up with.
Hope that helps,
Stephen
Re: Ignoring geolocation Quick Rule for US,CA
re session variables or blocked cookies: it's unlikely that this is the issue, depending on how you store the info. I think the $fromCountryId that stores the country code is usually calculated from scratch from the IP address of the client, though it is also cached in the session for speed. It's maybe possible that if cookies are blocked it could prevent the session from working, but I think in that case Chameleon would just recalculate the $fromCountryId from the IP address again.
I think it's more likely that it's one of the other scenarios in my previous reply.
Stephen
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