How to disable/reconfigure IMDB’s automatic geo-location so it does not default to German

geolocationimdblocalization

Since a few months IMDB appears to be "detecting" that I'm coming from a a German IP address and automatically changes the UI to German. More specifically it shows the Germany movie title when it has one.

This is massively annoying and I can't seem to find an obvious toggle to change this.

I do not have an account on IMDB.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening aside from an IMDB account (if that even helps)?

Best Answer

If you do not want to create an IMDb account and set your preferences there you need to:

Add X-FORWARDED-FOR with U.S. IP address to your HTTP headers. You can lookup example U.S. IP address from any proxy list, e.g. http://proxylist.hidemyass.com/.

The X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header field is a de facto standard for identifying the originating IP address of a client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer. This is an HTTP request header which was introduced by the Squid caching proxy server's developers. A standard has been proposed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardizing the Forwarded HTTP header.

Here are some simple instructions: http://sobizarre-en.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-easily-defeat-imdb-geolocation.html

You also need to remove any existing (file) cookies from IMDb in order to not keep using the settings that were assigned to you/your session when you first accessed IMDb.

In Chrome you can do that by typing chrome://chrome/settings/cookies in the address bar and then typing in "imdb" in the window that opens (click the x to the right on each row to delete. The x will not be visible until you hover over the row.)