Does s2member store IP Address?

[boldplans]

I've discovered that Wordpress itself may not store IP Address that the user used for signup. This is not a good thing, IMHO. Does s2member do this? Not only is it useful for spam prevention but it also can protect you in many ways and standard from virtually every registration system I've ever used online. Can anyone shed light on this? I see that s2member may be storing the IP address.

[Eduan]

I believe if you want to find a registered user's IP Address, you can find the user (under WP Admin -> Users -> All Users), click edit, in the s2Member section of the user (s2Member info) you will find the user's registration IP Address, that is to say, the IP address they had at the time of registration.

You can also reset the IP address restrictions on this user.
I've attached an image:

You can also configure IP Address Restrictions under WP Admin -> s2Member -> Restriction Options -> Unique IP Access Restrictions.

Hope this helps.

[boldplans]

Helps very much, thank you! It boggles my mind Wordpress stock doesn't do this and makes having membership software essential.

One last question if I may - is there a way to find the IP address by searching? I can't find any actual search options for users in s2m other than some global search, no ability to find date ranges of users who joined up on one day or during a period of time. But other than storing that data, here is the search most site admins need -- find a member based upon an IP Address you found in our error log or server log. Finding the IP Address of a user you already know is nice but not as useful. Can this be done?

[Eduan]

Right now it isn't possible (as far as I know) with s2Member or WordPress.

But there may be a plugin that allows you to do that.

Hope this helps.

[boldplans]

Right now it isn't possible (as far as I know) with s2Member or WordPress.
But there may be a plugin that allows you to do that.
Hope this helps.

Thanks for the attempt to help. To be completely honest, I'm beginning to see why a good number of serious developers don't choose Wordpress for serious projects. It's remarkable to me that many membership plugins and this one doesnt have even the most rudimentary aspects of member management at all. Permissions and levels for content access... wonderful... but it ends there and it can't if you're running a site of reasonable size and traffic.

For example, I can't do a simple targeted search through my membership to find all members registering this week, this month, yesterday. Can't find out who the troublemaker is whose IP address is pinging me and scraping my site. Apparently while S2Member has profile fields, none of them can easily be used on the front end without advanced programming, e.g. put in your social networking info but one cannot have tags to place these fields on forms with any ease. While it certainly does do some things nicely, overall I'm at a crossroads now of what to do going forward regarding using S2Member on our relaunched site because these are all regular necessities and things I expected spending over $100 for the professional version. I really like part of what I've seen but I do think the administrative functions need to happen sooner rather than later.

Thanks again for your help.

[Cristián Lávaque]

True, s2Member doesn't add user management tools to list, sort or search them. The registration dates are stored, but you'd need to do a database query to get the users by date range.

There are shortcodes to use the s2Member custom fields in pages/posts, you can read about them in the scripting documentation. WP Admin -> s2Member -> API / Scripting -> s2Member PHP/API Constants -> S2MEMBER_CURRENT_USER_FIELDS

Regarding the IP logging, s2Member does store the IP the user had when he registered, and on login if I'm not mistaken (although it doesn't have an interface for it). This doesn't log every WP action or things that happen to your website, though. You may want to check with your webhost to find who's abusing your site.

I hope that helps.

[boldplans]

Cristian - Thank you very much! I really like what you've done here. I feel that it's one of the best constructed membership plugins that just needs to take a few more steps and finish all the great work.

On any membership site, management tools are obviously a top priority. After all, how can you not have tools to find out groups of users easily? The IP Address management is critical and fortunately you've stored it. Regarding abuse of the site, my point is that any half knowledgeable admin can get the IP address of an abuser. What we need you guys to do is give me a tool to quickly search the S2M database for that user who has the matching IP Address and ban them manually.

Regarding the Custom Fields - thanks for pointing me in the right direction. It wasn't easy for me to locate the manual as well and now I know where it is. If it works as you say, this is again a major boon here, especially if it is accessible to the user on the front end. It's why I think Gravity Forms is an awesome tool but doesn't finish the job when it gets to registration and S2M may finish the job. If you use the registration plugin it only allows users to edit their profile in the admin, not on the front end like S2M.

Thanks again Cristian. The support here is excellent and I understand why there is such a high rating for this plugin. I hope you guys can take my suggestions, well intended.