IP address and a poll

D

Dave

I only let them vote on my poll once. I set a cookie and put there IP in my
database. Then I do a select to see if there IP is in the database and check
to see if they have a cookie. Does anyone see a problem with this?
 
R

Ray at

I see a couple of problems.

1. Your clock is wrong. You're jumping to the ~end~ of the line, which I
guess is extremely courteous. :]

2. A user can delete his cookie and vote again.

3. It's quite likely that more than one person will access your site via
the same IP, like users behind a firewall or a proxy server or AOL users.
There isn't a 100% fool-proof way of veryfing that one person does one thing
only one time. How can you determine it? It can't be done with any common
technology. You can make people register to vote and send confirmation
e-mails before they can vote, but even with that, I'd say that the average
person has over 1 e-mail address. Unless you can retina scan your site
visitors, you can't stop someone from doing something twice if he really
wants to, unfortunately. The best you can do is make it too much of a PITA
for someone to do something repeatedly and hope that it's enough.

Ray at home
 

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