Best way to geo block Texas for Wordpress?
 

Anyone have any suggestions for a good Wordpress plugin to Geoblock users from Texas?

Why not just comply with their age verification thing?

Practically impossible to do so, at least on a technical level, and I will (attempt to) explain why.

Very few ISP's (irregardless of US based or not) will use correct geo locations for their subnets, so for example, if you were to cook up a solution based on MaxMind's data, you would *ONLY* be partially compliant since many ISP's, especially on phone, will assign you an IP address from any subnets, many of which are *NOT* correctly located, and this is true for IPv6 as well, not just IPv4. It takes a while to fix, especially with smaller ISP's who resell, or forget to update geodata.. etc.

Best case scenario here is to have a lawyer draft you a warning page text where the visitor will agree that they are *NOT* accessing the site from within the said jurisdiction(s) and to leave if they do not want to verify their age, but if they already verified their age through something like Onfido, then they would just input a token of some sort, or however you would set it up to work like. This would have to be served for every page view, not just the homepage, otherwise you can't be compliant.

It's worthwhile to check if it would hold any merit, legally speaking..

This is an extremely tricky situation, and it CANNOT be solved through IPv4/IPv6 data alone... so you could (and would) still be fined if the solution isn't implemented properly (relying on IPv4/IPv6 data would leave for a decent amount of cases where the access would still be provided, and if you only serve the warning for the homepage, you would need to make sure it will always show, even if it's a returning visitor.. or someone from TX on a VPN -- you would potentially still be covered legally if they chose to ignore the terms of use).

Other soluton if you don't want to verify the visitor's age would be to move the website from the US and use a foreign virtual office for domain WHOIS and contact info, simply pretending to be a foreign entity.

Because that would be smart and safe. So let's not do that :1orglaugh

Today, the Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce age-verification requirements for porn sites, rejecting a request from the adult entertainment industry to block the law on First Amendment grounds.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/30/polit...ion/index.html

Fix your shit or pay like the dumbasses at Chaturbate just did.

To comply with the law it would cost about $1 per person. That's anywhere from $400-1,000 a day for me to comply. Thanks but I'll pass. I'd rather just block the entire state.

What happens if you're Canadian but host in the USA and don't block Texas?

Probably the same thing that happens if you're in the USA and don't comply with that EU cookie warning bullshit... absolutely nothing.

Plugins that use the maxmind database for GEO-IP location are free.

Use your AI to write a new function to send people from Texas to a site to buy a VPN, collect affiliate bonus.

It's not rocket surgery... You can be slow and still do it in under an hour. :2 cents:

most plugins just offer country blocking. this one does city and state as well

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ip-location-block/

When I was at Playboy they actually had a list of zip codes they would not do business with.... If you were in a specific zip code on the blocked list you could not sign up for their sites.

just use cloudflare IP range block, it might cost money but not too much!

If you do business in the US, then you are held accountable for their rules. This is the same thing that Chaturbate learned the hard way, and it ended up costing them $675k. They just settled with the state of Texas.

Texas isn't the only state that you need to watch out for. They were just the first to make an example out of semi-large website that they could push around.

If you're smart you'll be setting it up for more than just Texas :2 cents:

geoip doesn't have a state database, they only have country and city

not sure what to do here, i'm not gonna go through and block every city in texas/whatever other states this becomes necessary for

how are you guys solving this problem?

edit: cancel that, the geoip city database includes state

this sucks but at least its not that hard to implement.

Easy Age Verify plugin is the easiest. Does anyone have anything better?

yes just use an age verify plugin

that's just a popup that says "click yes if you're 18+"

I don't think that's strict enough for the new legislation

Did they spell out what to do to comply? It's the parent's job to raise their kid and police his or her Internet access, not ours.

Whoever enforces this is going to be very busy. They tried this before and it didn't work.

https://www.yoti.com/

https://withpersona.com/

https://ondato.com/

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Did you miss the part about Chaturbate just paying Texas almost $700k because they thought like you're thinking?