Dear Buddydev,

My suggestion is to auto-tag members with their country. Some reasons for suggestion:

1 – Consistency of country names
2 – Simple enforcement of country without the member having to do anything
3 – Helps prevent fraudulent activity (I’ve had many in my old sites pretending to be from different countries)
4 – Possibility to automatically give the member the flag of their country

In my former implementation I allowed members to choose their country if they wished but I also added a field for “Country Autodetected”. This also applied their country flag. This allowed me to check for problem customers and also showed me if they were using a VPN.

Resources (I will add other private resources):

Geolite 2 Free Downloadable Databases:

https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/

Thanks for your consideration.
Mike