Your plugin works fine for me with r7500. I'm sorry that my gallery usually has only ~10 visitors at a time, so I can't tell much about the performance impact (not notable at all on my SHP).
As this plugin currently only catters for the admin, the number of concurrent users doesn't matter too much. If you as admin don't notice a serious performance impact on pages where the plugin has got a lot of lookups to perform (e.g. on the stat_details page), then evertything should work fine.
Very good work Joachim, especially as this plugin delivers a base for a lot of things one could do with it. With some added options regarding spam protection (for example selectable from which countries comments, ecards etc are allowed), this should really go to core for 1.6.x.
I agree this this might go into the core at a later stage, but needs to be reviewed carefully: maxmind.com says that the FOSS plugin has got an accuracy of 99.5 % (their commercial version is meant to be 99.8 % accurate according to
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry). Applying comment sanitization based on Geo IP services can of course lead to false positives and therefore needs to be reviewed. Additionally, you lock out members of your target audience who are away on trips to countries where you wouldn't expect them to be. To actually come up with an interface for the coppermine admin that enables him to set comment approval based on IP addresses would require a lot of work. But: your suggestion definitely is worth considering.
Is this the place to ask for a 'per city' feature request? Nearly all my visitors come from Spain, but I'd like to know about the city. I can't access Maxmind's site at work (filtered by Websense, you know), so I can't see if that's possible using that database.
You'd have to rewrite the plugin slightly and use another database from MaxMind (
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity) that is less accurate, but it would be possible, yes.
Since I will probably use it I looked for the language files - and found none. ¿?
There is none, as I said:
This plugin doesn't have any configuration section (simply because there's no need for it) nor does it feature i18n.
There is no need for a language file because the only text that comes with the plugin is the hard-coded stuff inside the file configuration.php, which is something only the admin will see once when installing. Of course, multilanguage support could be added easily. You're welcome to have a go at it - it's a good way to get a grasp of the plugin architecture to accomplish a comparatively small task.
Is there any chance that these statistics can be shown to all users, for instance in the gallery main page? Or it isn't this package's purpose?
That's not the plugin's purpose: we don't display the IP addresses of our visitors publicly - that would be an invasion of privacy that I would object. Subsequently, as we nowehere display the IP addresses to the visitor, we don't display the flags neither. But of course it would be dead easy to come up with another code modification that makes the gallery display a sentence like "
Hello visitor, according to the IP address lookup we just performed you appear to come from XXX". But I don't think that you should tell your users how much you could figure out about them - they'd be shy and leave your site because they're afraid you'd be spying on them.
The technology beneath the service we're using is nowadays often used by adverts from dating sites to determine from which city or region you come from and display something to you like "
get in contact with XXX from YYY", where YYY is your city or a city nearby. Yes, one could come up with similar services, but I'm not going to be the person who codes this.
Joachim