To invert or not to invert the location information

[LawnchairLarry]

In SC4 beta, I noticed a small issue with the notation of the location of visitors in the visitor path: sometimes the location information is inverted (state, city, country) and sometimes it is not (city, state, country). The invertion of the location information does not seem to be specific for a certain country or a certain city, as I noticed both inverted and non-inverted location information. The same issue (http://forum.statcounter.com/vb/showthread.php?t=30920&highlight=location+order) occurred previously and was deemed resolved, but apparently is hasn't. Could you have a look at it again, please?

Here are some examples of inverted and non-inverted location information:

London, England, United Kingdom
Milano, Lombardia, Italy
New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Virginia, Reston, United States
Wise, Virginia, United States

[webado]

If you saw both types in the same detailed stats report, then it must be the geo location database has the values set that way for the particular IP. That means the ISP provided the wrong geo location information.

[LawnchairLarry]

I had a look at the detailed location information in the visitor path and indeed different internet service providers use different location information formats. I thought it was StatCounter that formats the location information. In this case, how can it be that the previous issue I referred to was resolved if StatCounter is dependent on the internet service provider for the location information to be formatted correctly?

[webado]

Statcounter is dependent on the information present in the geo location database they use. That information is provided by ISP's themselves.

If they invert city and region when they provide that, there you have it.

Some tiem agoo the inversion that was taking place is that Statcounter was reporting (for all entries in the log) the geo informaiton in a different order. But that order applied to all entries, not just a few. If there is a difference from one entry to another then it's due to how the data is provided in that database for that IP or range of IP's.

[Neil Parks]

This seems to be related to what I have posted previously about the reverse DNS lookup in the Visitor Path listing.

In the current production version of Statcounter, the city and state are always reversed. In the orig SC4 version, which displayed the plain IP instead of the reverse DNS, the city and state always appeared in the correct order.

But now that SC4 is displaying the reverse DNS the same way the production version does, it is also switching the city and state the same way the production version does.

[LawnchairLarry]

Cheers for clearing this up! :smile:

[webado]

I am seeing: City, Region/State/Province, Country. This to me is the logical order.
I see this in both sc3 and sc4, for Recent pageloads.

[LawnchairLarry]

I had another look at my stats and it seems the invertion of the location information occurs only in the visitor path, while the recent pageload activity and the recent visitor activity consistently show the location information in the "City, Region/State/Province, Country" format (which to me too is the logical order). For example, I had a visitor from Ottawa and another one from Calgary. The recent pageload activity and the recent visitor activity show Ottawa/Ontario/Canada and "Calgary, Alberta, Canada", while the visitor path shows "Ontario, Ottawa, Canada" and "Alberta, Calgary, Canada" and the "City, Region/State/Province, Country" format for several other visitor locations. It seems there is something wrong with the visitor path after all.