I have created a membership website but I don't want people from MY country to join. Well, I know that i can remove that country from the list of countries during registration but that doesn't stop me from entering "USA" and sign up. Is there a way to stop a person from my country to join my membership site via, say, Class A IP addresses?
You can do this with technique called "IP delivery" or sometimes "GEO targetting". I have implemented this on my own website - it automatically selects the customer's country on the signup form, based on their IP. They can always change it though. However, keep in mind that it's relatively simple to override any IP targetting by using proxy servers, SSH tunnelling and Virtual Private Networks. It is not 100% reliable, it's quite far from 100% actually. If you still want to implement it, be prepared for some coding as this feature is not implemented into aMember. If you want to use the built-in PHP functions, you will also need the GEO IP C library installed on the server. Honestly, if it's not critically important to your business, my personal suggestion is to find a different solution. Tomas
there is no way to completely block your country as users coming from proxy or vpns elsewhere can bypass any geo checking. That being said, are you comfortable with blocking them from your site as a whole? If so, just block them via your hosting CPanel.
I know they can go via proxy and join but my target market are pretty non-techies. So how do I block via CPanel? Is there anyway to use a script, insert them into a page and block them? I would prefer a script.
Tomfra... Don't suppose you have the Geo-Targetting script handy, or offer it as a plugin do you? I'd be interested in having my visitor's country auto-selected from the dropdown list, and to be honest, I think it's an excellent idea. Maybe if one of the admins see this they can include it in the next version. - David
As I said, the problem is that there is no "one script" solution. Well technically, it would be if there was the Geo IP C library installed on the server but it's not common with shared hosting. If you have a VPS or dedicated server, it's possible to install. If you have shared/reseller hosting, you will need to ask your hosting support to install it first. I am not completely sure how I installed the whole thing since it has been some time but if you can have the C library installed on the server, we can start with that. Tomas