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As cool as this might be, it has a major flaw. Take a look at the current mobile browser stats[1] (worldwide) and you'll see that Opera Mini/Mobile dominates. It, as well as any other proxy browsers such as UC browser, which are massively popular, will provide you with inaccurate information. I'm in South Africa and my IP is showing me to be in USA, and even the locale is wrong.

So, perhaps if Visitor.js had exception handling for where visitor.browser.name == [an array of known proxy browsers] then this might not be worth it if a good portion of your traffic is mobile.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201001-...



We should probably define "major". If your site is visited by tons of mobile visitors and you use the geo functionality to impact user experience, then for you, it may be. However, most sites continue to have far more desktop usage than mobile, on average. So, for most visitors to most sites, it's not really all that major. YMMV, of course.

In fact, GeoIP has suffered from the problem you describe for a decade now, from every AOL user appearing to come from Virginia, USA, all the way to modern corporate proxy systems which have vast numbers of visitors all appearing coming out of, say, White Plains, NY, USA (yes, there are lots of corps there... but not every employee works in that location).

So, your idea is a good one for mobile where we kind of know the big "offenders" (Kindle Fire may rise up to become an issue as well), but it's hard to figure this out for every IP.

Commercial GeoIP companies often offer a "confidence value" with their data which reflects how confident they are than an IP would really reflect the geo of the user; unclear if this service will have that. In addition, a good user experience might be to personalize the session but allow user feedback, ala "we think you are currently in Antarctica; click here to tell us where you really are..." You might also decide not to use some functionality in your "mobile skin" or other version of the site, if you do separate designs for mobile vs. desktop.

I say, best of luck to them. Web analytics continues to suffer from a disconnect: vast reporting on users, but little connection to taking that data and impacting a user's visit, even in future visits, much less in the same session. Let's see some folks push this a bit, even if the data has some problems (which, let's face it, is always a problem with any data involving the web, imho).


It's worse than that. It seems to be using the same deeply flawed GeoIP database as many other cheap/free services. For instance, the connection I'm on, a business class fibre connection with CenturyLink, claims to be located in "Tyler, TX", even though I'm 2000 miles from there.


I find those stats pretty suspicious and probably highly country-specific. Opera in number one place? Not in any developed country I know.


What are you on about? Think about what you're saying. Of the 5 billion or so connections to the internet, how many of those can possibly be from developed countries? Africa alone has ~800m Internet users, the majority of which use Opera as their primary browser. It's extremely popular in India and Indonesia too.


Well, you didn't disagree with me did you? I am just pointing out that use of Opera is strongly correlated with whether you live in a developing country. You claimed this product had a horrible flaw in its lack of attention to the Opera demographic. If your market is developed countries, then you don't need to worry about that too much. I think that is useful information.




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