Unvanquished Forum

I'm really interested as to why Unvanquished suddenly needs GeoIP. The following features concern me:

Country – maps the IP address to a country
Region – maps the IP address to a specific state/province within a country
City – maps the IP address to a specific city within a country. In the US, we are able to map many IP addresses to specific postal codes. This database also contains latitude, longitude, and time zone data.
Organization – maps the IP address to the organization which was assigned the IP address’s netblock.

So you want to find out exactly where I live, including the latitude and longitude, making it instantly easy for those psycho gamers, that suddenly have a grudge against me for no reason at all, to find exactly where I live and do who knows what to me. Thank you for secretively and forcefully taking the anonymity out of an online game.

I mean seriously, why do you need so damn much info about players? Just from the first few digits of the IP, you can get the overall location a player is from. Are you going to be printing my IP, full address, and global coordinates in-game for all to see? No? Then why? It's a whole extra dependency, it provides no really relevant features to players or servers or devs. Why? Unvanquished was just fine before, as was Tremulous, without this. Why now, why this?

Oh come on, I'm serious. Why do you need a whole complex and advanced GPS-type lib to just get the source country (which I don't like either, but it's better than "612 Serial Killer X's Next Victim Street"). It's overkill for what's needed for a game, and you don't really need even half of the functionality it provides. It's like using the idTech4 Engine to ONLY play minimum-pixel pong.

GeoIP is not required. You can disable it at compile time. Admins have access to your IP address (So they can ban you properly), as do the server hosts (and everyone whose website you have visited) . No, we do not print your IP address to everyone on the server. GeoIP only prints the country as you connect. Lastly, your IP address is a horribly inaccurate way to track you, so you are overreacting.

Maybe could we add the possibility to disable it in the options menu?

GeoIP is only used by the server; The IP address of a client isn't sent to another client. Therefor, the only thing that clients get to know about other clients is the rough location (nation) that is broadcasted by the server after the client connected. While it would be possible for clients to ask the server not to broadcast their rough location, the lookups as such are also useful for server administrators as it may help them to identify players behind a dynamically assigned IP address. If I'm not mistaken server operators can choose to disable the lookups and they can also compile a server binary without GeoIP support if they don't want to install the library at all.

Tom wrote:

Maybe could we add the possibility to disable it in the options menu?

This should be answered by the above: Since they don't do them, clients also cannot disable the lookups.

Thanks for the info.

cmake -DUSE_GEOIP=OFF