Org listed as 127.0.0.0 - what, and how?

Hiya, I see someone visited my website overnight and made an enquiry but their visit is listed in the Organisation column as 127.0.0.0.

I don’t know a lot about IP tech but… isn’t that coming from ‘inside the house’ so to speak??

Now that we're behind a reverse proxy (Cloudflare) and visitors don't connect directly to our servers anymore, we depend on CF to pass along the connecting IP address via a special header. I assume these 'localhost' visitors are a side effect of when CF does NOT send along an IP for whatever reason.

I think "no IP" being converted to a local IP is just PHP's ip2long() converting "blank" to "0" (storing as integer in the database is much more efficient), and then long2ip() converting 0 back to 127.0.0.1. I'll probably update it so if there's no IP, it will just say "Unknown" or something like that. That will cause confusion too though. So I will also probably need to make a knowledge base article about this and then link to that article directly from the session details page when the IP is blank.

Yesterday we updated our load balancer to also pass along the Cloudflare Proxy IP to our backend servers. So now in cases where the visitor IP is invalid or ipv6, we fallback on the proxy IP, which should be geographically close to the visitor in most cases. Since this change about 18 hours ago, I haven't seen any "localhost" visitors in the sites I monitor, so it's working pretty well. Before it was about 1 out of 300 visitors had a localhost IP. You may still see some but it's definitely much better now.