Security and Accessibility for Internet Sites

I began a successful drop-shipping Internet site several years ago that gets orders from people all over the world. One of the problems I had when I first started out was being able to convert the time of day for those who were ordering in different time zones both here in the United States as well as those in other countries. When somebody places an order it’s rather important to know exactly what time they placed that order; it’s important for me as well as for the customer. I needed an easy to use geolocation database that would easily convert the time and date according to when it was placed by each customer no matter where they lived.

There was also a problem in converting dates as many places around the world don’t format their date as we do in the United States. We in the United States show the date as MM/DD/YY, while other counties have different formats for this. I needed software for my website that would do this automatically for each country. After doing some research I found the perfect geolocation software that would take care of all these problems as well as help in the security of my site.

One of the other things this software provided was to automatically pick up where the customer was ordering from, which helps in calculating shipping costs. This application saves time in the ordering process and makes for a user-friendly site. It does this by noting the Internet Provider address (IP address) of the customer who is making the order and then sets the shipping costs associated with that address. The same application also uses the C# format date in order to display the correct date and time format for each individual customer who makes an order no matter where in the world they live.

I recommend that anybody who is going to begin any kind of business on the Internet use some kind of geolocation software in order to bridge the gap between time zones and date formats. It really is quite important to know the IP location of customers visiting your site as you never really know when this information might be needed to track an order or customer. Using this type of software also makes your site a more pleasant experience for your customers which will draw them back for subsequent orders.

Tricks of the Trade

When administrating or even moderating a public social Internet site, you have to learn lots of tricks in order to protect it as well as the active members using the site. One of the first tricks I learned as a moderator and administrator was to utilize the IP geolocation software available to me. To understand how to use this software one must understand what it does.

"IP" stands for Internet Provider and is the address associated with each computer at a specific address. It is like a fingerprint that traces a user to the location of the computer when that person made a specific post. The IP geolocator is a very handy trick to use if you need to monitor a certain member on the site that is not participating within the rules of the site. Once the person is warned several times, you can use the IP address to ban the person permanently from the site. It is a much better solution of moderating rather than banning by e-mail address, considering e-mail addresses are very easily obtained.

Spammers are also a huge problem on most social networking sites. They become legitimate members and then begin posting advertisements to different sites trying to draw people to the site they are advertising in order to get purchases. Many spammers have access to hundreds of e-mail addresses but often only have one IP address. Using IP geolocation,an administrator or moderator can ban the spammer by IP address and never have to worry about them again. The problem with so many social networking sites is the moderators are not taught how to ban by IP and simply ban by e-mail address. Twenty minutes later the same spammer is back on the site with a new address.

The first thing I did when creating my site was to add IP geolocation software and then train my moderators how to use it. I was able to minimize the amount of spam that was posted on my site as well as take control of hostile situations that happen between members. This has been a tool I would not want to live without when owning a social networking site. Having the ability to stop somebody in their tracks and knowing they have little options in getting back on my site helped me to run a clean stress free site with little spam and few arguments between members.