Posted by Beauregard T. Shagnasty on 06/19/07 21:58

vunet.us@gmail.com wrote:

> Thank you for sharing your experience. Well, if manual check is still
> the final touch, perhaps, there is a way to get rid of international
> spammers who register with Indianapolis, FL, 11133 USA?

Familiarity would tell you straight away that 11133 should be on Long
Island. But it isn't... being a non-used number. So your entry is bogus.

You could write logic that, if full five digits not found, looks at the
first three digits, and see if the state matches other codes in your
database beginning with the same three.

11101 through (but not inclusive) 11120 is Long Island City, and 11133
is not in the list at all.

> What would you suggest considering the fact I have no geographical
> database (yet)?

Purchasing a database is more or less painless, except to your credit
card. You buy, then download, so you get it right away.

http://www.zipcodeworld.com/zipcodepremium.htm
is now down to $99.95 for a year's subscription. The Basic is cheaper
but doesn't have latitude and longitude, which I use. When you purchase,
you choose what format (among several common ones) you want. I use the
FoxPro .DBF format, as I do my database work with Visual FoxPro. Most
offer ASCII text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and .DBF. Any of
these formats are convertible to others. A comma-delimited file would be
easy to import into a web server's MySQL database, for example.

Naturally, before you take this step, you would need to be able to write
server code, perhaps in PHP, to utilize it.

I'm a (now retired) RDBMS guy, so this is easy-peasy for me. :-)

--
-bts
-Motorcycles defy gravity; cars just suck

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