A website annoyance (or “Why I Hate Facebox”)
There’s one feature many large websites have adopted to make life easier for their visitors that drives me up the wall and makes me want to send the programmers to Gitmo: IP-to-Nation mapping.
See, I’m stationed in Europe and whenever I go to a website for the first time that has this feature, or my cookie(s) for that site have expired, I’m confronted with the website’s being in the language of my host country. Now, I can read and speak the language, but that’s beside the point. I’m an American, not a citizen of my host country — when I browse the web, I expect to be able to read it in English. Now, I understand that for most people in my host country, it’s a huge convenience and it’s great for that particular website because that will get more people to sign up and bring them more advertising revenue.
However, the implementation is piss-poor. Assuming that a visitor is from a certain country based on his/her ip address is foolhardy and makes assumptions that shouldn’t be made. Many Americans don’t understand their host country’s language, and are then therefore unable to navigate the site to reset their language preferences. There’s also the issue of people who wish to surf anonymously and use web proxies to visit websites — the IP addresses their browsers report are not necessarily in the same country the surfer is located in. Some of the websites that do this are: Google, Myspace, Blogspot, and Gay.com. These don’t bother me that much.
The most egregious implementation of this idiotic feature comes from www.facebox.com — this is so outrageous that I’m not even going to give them a link (they don’t deserve it!). This particular website uses IP-to-Nation mapping to fill in an unalterable field in their registration field to denote your country. When I signed up to check it out, I figured, “Okay, no problem, I’ll just change it later.” NOPE! Can’t do that! There is absolutely no way of changing your country in your profile settings on this website. What makes it even worse, is that it uses your country information to determine what you’re allowed to do. Searching for profiles that are from the United States on this website is impossible when your country is set to certain ones.
From the FAQ: (note that their inept programmers couldn’t even be bothered to use stripslashes() to filter out the backslashes that are used by the database to prevent certain characters from being parsed)
Why can\’t I search profiles in the UK, USA, Australia etc?
The UK, USA, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are core Facebox countries, meaning they are subject to stricter privacy protections on Facebox. You can only search for Facebox profiles in these countries if you are located in the country itself.
Gee, thanks for excluding the thousands of Americans who live outside the US but will be returning sometime! What if someone was getting ready to move back to the States and was looking for new friends where s/he was moving to? I’m still subject to American laws you morons!
I can tolerate a website using IP-to-Nation mapping up to a point. I normally set my language and website preferences back to English, but when a website is so obnoxious as to refuse to allow me access to the portions of it which I should be entitled to use (such as looking at profiles in the United States), then I get angry. This is a stupid way of determining what language to present to the user. It’s not only stupid, it’s not accurate!
A better way of doing this would be to look at the headers that the browser sends to the webserver. Part of the information that the browser transmits to the webserver is the language that the person uses! For example, my browsers send this: ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en. That’s English. A German’s browser would send ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: de. Using the browser header is a more foolproof method of determining what language to present your website in.
I’m still angry about the Facebox debacle. If I were to keep that profile (I deleted it), I wouldn’t even be able to change it when I PCS back to the States because there’s no way of doing it! The next person who “invites” me to this website will receive a less-than-pleasant reply with a link to this post.
If the people behind this website ever pull their heads out of their fourth-points-of-contact, then perhaps I’ll change my opinion on their service. Until then, I will refuse to use it, and will recommend (publicly!) that no one else does either.
February 15th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Hello soldier
Well, here the Facebox crew is pulling their heads out. I do have some comments on your opinion, and of course, we don’t agree completely with what you are saying here.
First of all, indeed, we are determining where people are located based on their IP’s, information we use afterwards to show them the correct language, and to enter their location. The first thing is the easy part for the member: he or she is redirected automatically to the correct Facebox. However, it’s really simple to change your language settings. For example, if you want to go to the English Facebox, simply go to en.facebox.com instead of to facebox.com. The only thing we do, is making it easier for the member to get directly to the correct site, by checking his IP.
However, there’s another, very important reason why we are using that IP track system, and that one has everything to do with safety. Incrowd - the production house of Facebox - is not a new player in the market, we had some experience with these community sites before. What we’ve noticed in the past, is that a lot of members were having problems with spammers and scammers from other countries. As we want our members to feel at ease, we’ve decided to do something about this, and we’ve done this by protecting our core countries from being found by members in non core countries. There would be no use in doing this if we’d allow you to change your location to a core country, so we don’t allow it, and your location is IP based. It solved a lot of problems on our sites, so we think we’ve made the correct decision.
Any comments on this are of course welcome. My e-mail address is lien at incrowd.be, be my guest. I hope I was able to convince you somehow that this is in the member’s interest.
Regards
February 15th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
It may be intended for your users’ safety; however, it makes the site completely unusable for citizens of your “core countries” who are currently residing abroad. I stand by my opinion that it’s a bad decision and that there are other options available. Basically, you’re telling people to screw off and that your website won’t be usable for them and there is no recourse for them.
There is, of course, recourse available: use competitors who don’t place artificial and arbitrary limitations on users who wish to use the services. I wish you the best of luck with the website and I hope the advertising revenue is profitable, but the implementation is still piss-poor and gives a big F-U to me and others in my situation.