Re AMZ above for info - and zcoder, what are you talking about?
Decker, just look at the first page of this thread ....
The software we are talking about is GeoIP from Maxmind
Basically in a nutshell, you have a compressed database on your server
that has the country and / or city locations of every IP address on
the internet and new updates are released each month that can be
easily downloaded by cron job.
Then you use either the Apache module or language plugins to enable
your server to make use of the database.
The Apache module is the coolest way to do it because you automatically
get 2 new server variables with every connection that give you the
country code and country name of every visitor connection!
It's a piece of cake to blacklist (or even whitelist) whole countries!
Using this technology also allows you to deliver different content
automatically based on the country of the visitor which is another
really cool thing you can do with GeoIP!
I pretty much consider GeoIP a "must install" item on all servers! :wave: