[Feature Request] Display Country Flags for Peers in Web Interface

[abubaca4]

Description

The TrguiNG web interface (browser-based version) currently lacks the ability to display country flags for connected peers, unlike its desktop counterpart. This feature is useful for visualizing the geographic distribution of peers.

The desktop version uses a local dbip.mmdb database to resolve IP addresses to country codes and then maps them to flag icons.

Proposed Solutions

1. Simple Solution – External API (like Transmissionic)

• Use a free public API such as api.country.is or similar services to resolve IP to country code.
• Pros: Easy to implement, no additional dependencies or bundle size increase.
• Cons: Privacy concerns (sending peer IPs to a third party), reliance on external service availability and rate limits, potential latency.

2. Preferred Solution – Local MMDB with WASM (like Desktop)

• Use dbip.mmdb with a WebAssembly module like maxminddb-wasm to read the database directly in the browser.
• Pros: Works offline, no external data leakage, consistent behavior with desktop version.
• Cons: Increases bundle size (WASM module + MMDB file), requires WASM support in the browser. Could fallback gracefully (hide flags) if WASM is unsupported.

Additional Considerations

• The MMDB file (e.g., dbip.mmdb) needs to be fetched and updated periodically. Could be bundled with the release or downloaded on run.
• We might need an option in settings to disable the feature to save bandwidth/memory.

References

• Transmissionic’s implementation using api.country.is: Transmissionic Code Reference
• maxminddb-wasm library: maxminddb-wasm on GitHub

[qu1ck]

You have a decent outline of possible solutions, I would just add that there is a pure javascript lib for maxminddb format so wasm is not necessary (and in fact I wouldn't want to ship an opaque binary in web bundle).

I looked into viability of this before and decided against it for following reasons:

1. 3rd party services are unreliable and usually free tiers are borderline deceptive about rate limits
2. Shipping the geoip database and the flags css will increase the web bundle size from 350kb to > 13Mb, 37x increase! Combine that with transmission not sending correct cache control headers that means everything will be downloaded every time.

So both options are horrible in my opinion.

While seeing the countries in peers list is nice (thats why I implemented it in the app) I don't think it outweighs the need of the web ui to be light weight and fast.

[abubaca4]

Transmissionic has 244 flags in png with a total size 182kb. After oxipng -o max --strip safe -z -r . it's become 166kb.
What resolution are your flags that take up 5 MB? Transmissionic uses 24x24.

[abubaca4]

I don't think it's critical for us to have a completely up-to-date dbip.mmdb; it gets updated no more frequently than a new version of TrguiNG is released anyway. The main thing is that it's stored browser-side and doesn't get downloaded unnecessarily every time the page loads.

[qu1ck]

TrguiNG uses vector flags in pure css. Probably overkill for the tiny flags displayed but 24x24 is too small for modern high dpi displays.

It's true that ip db does not get updated more frequently than TrguiNG is released (although if it's just a web bundle you could update it whenever you want) but how do you know you should update it after TrguiNG version is updated? You either redownload it periodically or store last downloaded version in localstorage/indexdb somewhere and if TrguiNG is updated then redownload the ip db too.

The point is: if this can be implemented without massive network overhead and making UI sluggish, I'm not opposed to it. But I would much rather see a fix on transmission side before adding crutches in TrguiNG.

[abubaca4]

I propose the following approach:
Two releases, one small and the other with flag support.
If the db file is not available in IndexedDB, it is downloaded and saved there.
A timestamp of when the db file was loaded and which TrguiNG version was used at the time of loading are stored in localStorage.
If the TrguiNG version doesn't match, the file is reloaded.
If more than a month (the timeframe can be any) has passed since the last download, the file is reloaded.

[qu1ck]

That's pretty much what I wrote.
I will not implement that since like I said I would prefer transmission to get fixed first and there would be no need for crutches.
But if someone sends a PR and it works well enough it will likely get merged.