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Hello! I run an auction house for a primarily text based MMORPG that’s PG-13 with the use of Airtable. Lately, we’ve received some submissions that are clearly meme/pranks. The problem is, that some of the material that have been submitted have involved nudity and acts that are lewd.

Which breaks the rules of the auction house, as well as the MMORPG that the auction house is ran for (It’s the internet. Some players in the game are minors.). That being said, the staff for the game has asked that I grab the IP address of those that have submitted such images/content so that those users can be banned as appropriate by the game’s TOS.

Is there a way for me to discover an IP address of the form submitter or figure out whom submitted what?

Hi @Mishka_Sorokin
I am not sure if you can get an IP address of the form submitter, what if they are on a VPN?

You could make a required field in the form that is their player ID, then check that ID against a banned list to approve the post.


Your #1 best bet for this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it will capture everyone’s IP address who submits a form.

You can manually review these IP addresses in Fillout, or you can automatically process these IP addresses via Fillout’s API by using Make’s Fillout integrations and creating your own automation there.

(If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.)

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a formcreate custom PDF files from a form submissionaccept payments on formspre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


Hi @Mishka_Sorokin
I am not sure if you can get an IP address of the form submitter, what if they are on a VPN?

You could make a required field in the form that is their player ID, then check that ID against a banned list to approve the post.


If they’re on a VPN, that VPN will pop up as well in the game. While I could go ahead and create a login prompt, I also don’t want to discourage users from submitting.


We’ve built an advanced form for Airtable. It supports capturing the user’s IP address.


Dealing with inappropriate content, especially when minors could be involved, requires prompt action, and it's good that the game staff is taking steps to maintain a safe environment.

Unfortunately, Airtable itself, as a form host, doesn't inherently record or display the IP address of the form submitter for privacy reasons.

However, there is a technical approach you can implement for future submissions to gather this data for appropriate action by the game staff.

To do this, you would need to use a server-side setup involving a few different services.

The general concept is to capture the user's IP address before they submit the form and pass that information along with the form data.

This can be achieved by using a tool like Google Tag Manager (GTM) for initial data capture and then routing that data through a service that can process and store it, often referred to as server-side tracking.

A robust solution involves using Google Tag Manager with server-side tracking setup, perhaps via a dedicated service like Stape or by setting up your own server on a platform like Google Cloud Platform.

You would first deploy a script through GTM on the page hosting your Airtable form.

This script could capture the user's IP address and a unique identifier for the session, which is standard practice in web analytics.

The IP address is accessible to the client-side environment and can be sent as a custom dimension with a GTM event, such as a custom event or a page_view event, to your server-side GTM container.

Once the data hits your server-side GTM container, a service like Stape or your Google Cloud Platform endpoint can then process it.

You would need a method to tie this server-side data, which contains the IP address, to the specific Airtable form submission.

This is the trickiest part and requires passing a unique identifier (like a session ID or a hidden field value) from the client-side script through the Airtable form itself.

When the form is submitted, the Airtable API would then be used.

Airtable's API doesn't directly provide the IP, but you could use the form submission event, which you can capture via an automation platform like Make or Tray.io, to trigger a lookup.

In a highly integrated system, the automation tool would receive the Airtable submission, grab the unique identifier from the submission, and then query your server-side data (the logs from Stape or Google Cloud Platform) to find the matching IP address.

Furthermore, integrating with an IP Geolocation API would be beneficial.

Once you have the IP address, you could immediately pass it to an IP Geolocation API to get additional information, like the approximate physical location of the submitter, which can be useful for verification or for the game staff's investigation, though location data should be handled with care and in accordance with privacy policies.

This combined approach of Airtable API integration for submission tracking, GTM for client-side data capture and event transmission, a server like Stape or Google Cloud Platform for processing, and an IP Geolocation API for supplementary data provides a powerful and actionable way to track the source of those inappropriate submissions.

This setup ensures that the game staff receives the necessary data to enforce their TOS.