In the admin screen for users we can see their last visited and registered IP addresses. In line with my company’s approach to privacy, we don’t want to record these but I can’t see a setting to switch it off. Is there something I’m missing, or would we have to fork Discourse? Or perhaps a plugin could override the code? Any help is appreciated.

There are a number of anti-abuse measures that rely on having knowledge of the client IP address in order to function. Also, the client IP is logged in a number of places, including at least two different log files (nginx access log and rails log), so you’ll need to modify some pretty deep config in order to get rid of those, too. And yes, I’d say you’re likely going to need to fork to eradicate all those.

Thank you for the quick answer Matt. We’ve already worked on the log files to stop IP addresses being recorded there. Looks like we’ll have to dig deeper for the remainder to not be logged. Seems to be beyond what a plugin can achieve.

You could likely setup a nginx proxy in front of Discourse and have it pass in 0.0.0.0 for all IP addresses. proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

Thanks very much @cpradio, that sounds like a good idea. I’ll suggest it to our developers.

Then you will need to turn off rate limiting, because everything will look like a DDOS.

Good thinking @Falco. I’ll change the rate settings if we go down that route.

Thanks @codinghorror. Ideally we don’t want the IPs touching our database/logs but that’s something to consider.

Another idea is to intercept the IP lookup call and replace it with a modified, random version of the “real” IP (so every request doesn’t appear to come from the same IP, or a totally random IP). That would probably be safest in my opinion.

@codinghorror That sounds like a really good compromise, avoiding having to turn off rate limiting. We’ll probably go with this, barring difficulties. Thanks for all the help to find a solution.

Possible to not log user IP addresses?

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) June 27, 2016, 3:22pm 8

Maybe it would be easier to let the IPs be recorded and then periodically run a query that changes them to random private ip addresses, say daily?

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Possible to not log user IP addresses?

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