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Post by Mike-on-Tour »

IP Address Deletion is an extension to the phpBB bulletin board software to ascertain that data protection regulations with regard to the future storage of deleted users' IP address are adhered to.

There are countries where the IP address an internet user uses is assumed to belong to his/her personal data and thus falls under privacy and data protection laws. Especially the supreme court of the European Union ruled that a user has a right to be informed if the IP address from which he/she logs into a web site is stored and that he/she has a right to have this information deleted if the respective service is no longer used. This means that the IP address still stored within phpBB's database must be deleted if a user gets deleted.
phpBB stores user IP addresses in several tables and explicitly within the posts table it is not deleted if a user gets deleted and his/her posts are retained. This is what IP Address Deletion does.
To fulfill this task IP Address Deletion is hooked into phpBB's delete_user function via the core.delete_user_before event. Everytime a user is deleted it replaces IP addresses stored with this user's user_id with 0:0:0:0 to ensure that nowhere within the phpBB core tables the IP address is stored any longer.

Please note
IP Address Deletion has no settings page and therefore is not visible on the ACP's extension tab. It only works in the background after being enabled successfully. Its existence is oly visible through the row listing it in the active extensions table of the ACP's 'Customize' tab.