Geolocation Frustration

Support & Bugs
1

Hey there,

Let me preface this post by saying I am absolutely loving Piwik so far. Great interface and performance thus far.

I’m finding that the Geolocation settings on my installation are returning city information less than 20% of the time. I have the GeoIPCity.dat database installed in the Misc folder but it’s still only pulling this information for myself:

According to this provider, your current location is:
(38, -97)
United States
Org: Unknown
ISP: Unknown

This is using the GeoIP (Php) setting. I would try PECL but I’m on shared hosting therefore I cannot run the script. Do I need to just buy the actual MaxMind database? I feel like if it’s only getting city information 20% of the time or less, it severely limits what Piwik can do for me.

2

please use paid maxmind geo DB. After you upgrade to paid, is it better?

3

Hey Matt,

Thanks for the reply. That’s pretty much what I assumed so not a problem. Am I able to buy addition GeoIP databases or is the GeoIP City database the only one that is used with Piwik?

4

you can buy provider and other, see FAQs about geoip

5

I’m facing the same issue. I would like to use IP2Location LITE but it is not currently supported by Piwik.

It is not fair to request us to upgrade to commercial where as we can get a better accuracy in other free option.

I’m in progress to port the LITE data to GeoIP2 using IP2Location LITE to GeoIP. I’m not sure if this work out.

I wish to know when Piwik can support another geolocation data vendor?

6

Are you aware of this :

http://www.ip2location.com/developers/piwik

Never tried it and probably never will, I’m just passing the info.

Dali

7

I’d be very interested to know how well that database works.

Unfortunately, I agree with tech9669. I love Piwik but poor geolocation out of the box absolutely kills it’s effectiveness. Users can get incredibly accurate geolocation from a system like Statcounter for nothing.

8

Do you know any alternative better than GeoIP for free geo location? I would like to know as maybe we can implement support for them. But it cannot be a webservice, because webservices are unreliable and can crash (especially when we have to do so many million requests from all piwik users)

Btw if anyone wants to add support , we would love to support this, as it could be done as a plugin in the marketplace: http://plugins.piwik.org/

9

Hi Matt,

You might want to take a look at IP2Location LITE.

10

This looks very interesting indeed. How is the accuracy of this service compared to maxMind free edition?

11

Hello Matthieu,

Any news on that ? so far everything looks great in piwik features, just the geolocation which is bad. I live in Canada, and my ip is recognized as USA, when I check in ip websites checker, my ip gives canada / quebec / montreal which is correct

FYI I installed geoip2 plugin
and downloaded and uploaded the .dat file in misc

Still the same inaccuracy.

Can we have other providers ?
Thanks

12

Hi @Charles-Jeremy_Colne,

Do you know any (open) geolocation databases that Piwik could use?

13

No but so far https://lite.ip2location.com looks really interesting, but I don’t know if the piwik team implemented it or not

14

Hi,

This looks really nice.

As the geolocation in Piwik is implemented modular, everyone could write a plugin that implements a new geolocation.

That way it would be possible to provide multiple new platforms and make it possible for users to select the one they want to use on the marketplace.

And if a new provider is established it could be used as a replacement for the current default one.

15

it looks like it is done, I am uploading all the files

https://plugins.piwik.org/Ip2location?piwikversion=3

16

Ah, indeed I forgot that there is already an official plugin:

17

and it is working perfectly