Store more than one IP address per user

Log more than just a single last used IP address for a user

My request would be for 3 or more IP Addresses

Generally I find that users are logging in simultaneously from multiple devices including:

  • Home Desktop
  • Home Tablet
  • Mobile Phone
  • Work Computer

A single IP is a bit pointless - whilst the two home connections may appear to be from the same IP address I usually find that the Mobile phone connects over 3G and work computer another IP.

This helps deal with systems administration, multiple accounts issues, debugging error reports found in logs and other usual items where IP address is used.

4 Likes

Currently there are 2 IPs that get logged

  • Registration IP
  • Last used IP

In my experience with vB it was usually the Registration IP that was more helpful in spotting and identifying problem accounts.
But there have been a lot of times where knowing the Posting IP was helpful.

Because Last IP can be transient, you do have to be a lot quicker if you’re wanting to use it.

In most of my installations an external SSO handles the account creation - thus we don’t have a “Registration IP” in Discourse.

So the more IP’s stored the better directly against the users account.

I know it might be a pain to implement but a date next to each IP used would also aid systems administration.

Sure long term we should store ip addresses of all logged on sessions and allow admins to log off particular sessions selectively or get info about them.

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Is Discourse still only storing the two IP’s per user?

The actual storage has been complete for quite a long time. We have some plans to expose more of this information to admins/users probably in 2.1

In particular admins want to know:

  1. List of users that are “suspicious” cause they are logged in from both Bangladesh and USA at the same time.

  2. View where a user is logged in from at the moment and allow admins to invalidate specific sessions

  3. Allow end users to see where they are logged in from and a log of all of the times they logged in/out including access to own IP.

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It’s pretty common on major sites for them to enter “freak out mode” when a user suddenly logs in from a very different IP address than they usually do, from a country halfway across the world.

This feature kinda sucks when you go on vacation, but I see why they do it.

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FTR, this is being worked on in

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/6335

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Is it actually possible to not log IP info if I’m interested in running a privacy minded forum?

Thank you.

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