Community ads

Just for curiosity:

How do the "Community Ads" work?

I've noticed that even though I did not set any location for my account I get "ads" for PM-groups very close to where I live - is that just coincidence or is there some logic in place that somehow maps ip-addresses back to geographical locations?

If this is the case: How does it work and who provides such services?

If you really track Monks geographically can you generate a map to show their distribution around the globe?

Many thanks!

Comment on Community ads

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Re: Community ads by ambrus (Abbot) on Apr 05, 2009 at 12:52 UTC
To clarify, these monk maps do not detect your location from your IP address. Jcwren defined a protocol of location markers you could place to your homenode “biblography” by hand, and his monk map and nearest monk tables scanned homenodes for such markers. This was documented on his statistics pages, which don't work anymore. The format is magic html comments like `<!-- location:latitude=38.08.19.5,longitude=4.50.31.2 -->` which gives your geograpical coordinates in degrees, minutes, and seconds, with positive numbers meaning north and east respectively. Castaway's map also used these comments, as well as recognizing geographical names you put to your location field of your homenode, and using the timezone you set in your settings as a fallback.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: ip address to location by linuxer (Curate) on Apr 04, 2009 at 23:03 UTC
... How does it work and who provides such services? Maybe you should have a look at Geo::IP or IP::Country for details.	[reply]
Re: Community ads by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 05, 2009 at 02:00 UTC
The "ads" -- actually, Perl-related public announcements are aggregated by an outside entity (whose principals may likely include one or more Monks) and posted here using some code yitzchak provided. TBOMK, any seeming relationship between your location and the advertisers is purely concidental. However, as to your second question, can you generate a map to show their distribution around the globe?, the answer is "Yes" ...and it's already been done as a world map with monk locations marked. Unfortunately, the server appears to be down, or I'm looking in the wrong place.	[reply]
Re: Community ads by ysth (Canon) on Nov 10, 2014 at 17:57 UTC
Missed this question, sorry :) The ads come from Gabor Szabo's ad server via javascript, and I believe that does use IP address to guess at location. However, it is now being shut down: http://blogs.perl.org/users/gabor_szabo/2014/11/shutting-down-the-perl-community-adserver.html -- A math joke: r = \| \|csc(θ)\|+\|sec(θ)\| \|-\| \|csc(θ)\|-\|sec(θ)\| \|	[reply]
Re: Community ads by Anonymous Monk on Jun 22, 2009 at 10:59 UTC
Community Ads appear depend on javascript :\|	[reply]