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Determine which IP information services we want to use
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Description

Goal

For the IP Info feature that AHT is going to be working on, we will need to acquire IP Information from external IP information websites. We need to vet some external websites to see which ones meet our needs so we can go ahead and start using them.

The information we need from the IP is as follows:
Must have:

  • Location: City, State, Country
  • Owner information: company/institution that owns an IP address
  • Size of the IP block owned by the company

Nice to have:

  • Membership of the IP address in online blacklists
  • Whether the IP address is known to be a VPN or Tor node
  • Translations available
  • Link to Wikidata

@dbarratt did a brief investigation into this earlier which is captured here: T248525#6067003
Based on his investigation we reached out to both ipinfo.io and auth0 signals. The latter did not offer support for what we needed so now we are left with only one site. We need at least 2 other IP vendors that we can rely on to meet our needs.

Event Timeline

Niharika created this task.

From the subjective spreadsheet I created I think I would look at these vendors to meet most of the criteria (in no particular order):

I lean towards those three because they seem to (from what I can tell) offer more flexibility over how we could potentially implement the data (i.e. having our own copy of the database, etc.). If we already have a relationship with MaxMind, that seems like the obvious choice.

You should look at Spur. We are using it at the WikiProject on open proxies with very good results. I have independently verified its accuracy for many cases, and it is far superior to every option that has been mentioned in previous discussions.

It also provides some important information for proxy checking, CheckUser, etc, such as the exact VPN and proxy services present in an IP, not just a boolean flag. A US Comcast IP with a Luminati residential proxy has nothing to do with a Bangladesh CG-NAT gateway with 5 residential proxy networks present.

Thank you @MarioGom. We want to add multiple services into IP Info eventually. We are beginning with MaxMind for now and will look into Spur in the near future. It's awesome that you've validated Spur already.

Niharika claimed this task.