When the Maxmind (city) database doesn’t yield a result for a given IP address, the Visitor Location (City) widget reports “unknown”. However, according to the Visitors in Real-time widget, the country of the IP can be determined.
Example IP: 144.76.45.16
According to the Visitors in Real-time widget, this IP address is in Liechtenstein, but according to the Maxmind database, the location is unknown.
The Visitor Location (city) widget should be reporting the country when the Maxmind database reports “unknown”.
Matt:
You’re missing the point. I know that this is “by design”. I’m asking that the “design” be amended so that when the city can’t be determined, the fallback should be to show the country. I should NOT need to look at the “country” widget to determine where the “unknown” cities fall.
If the “city” widget shows only a country name (or flag), it’s obvious that the city is unknown. Don’t make me look in two places and then match the two different displays.
Besides that, the “city” widget tells me that there’s no information when all I have is “unknown”. That’s wrong too. The City widget will currently show “unnown” only when there are some known cities in the list.
Simply put: The handling of unknown cities is plain dumb.
It becomes confusing only if you insist on showing the text “unknown” when all you know is the country, particularly so if you treat each different IP address mapping to the same country but with unknown location within that country as a distinct entry in the “unknown” list.
When the exact loction cannot be determined from the Maxmind database, just show the country without any additional accompanying “unknown” text. I don’t see that this is confusing.
If this proposed behaviour is confusing to you, why not make it a configuration option? It doesn’t even have to be an option accessible from the User Interface, as long as it’s mentioned in the FAQ.