Spammers who keep refreshing !?

[Anon]

Hello ..

I'm having a problem with my Site ..
I do have articles section and for every article there is a counter in the database that I increase it everytime this page is accessed to get statistics like : Top Articles.

Now the problem some people go to the page and keep refreshing till the article reach the top of the Top Articles page.

What I need is to make the browser don't update the counter if the user used a refresh key.

I know that can be done by putting the update counter query in : If Statement

but I have no idea what should I write in it.

I'm a PHP Newbie .. so can anybody help ?

Thanks in Advance.

[terje-s]

I can't immediatly say that I know how you could do this by putting the query in an if statement.

However, there are several ways to solve this problem.

Method #1: Send a cookie to the browser named something like 'readArticle12' where 12 would be an ID for a specific article. You can then test if the person has accessed this article before (set a two day timeout or so on the cookie).. See php manual on setcookie().

Another solution would be to, once a person actually reads the article, insert data to a table in your database. The data would include at least the users IP address, and maybe his browser version, and ofcourse an identfier for the article being read. You could then, upon a new load, check this table for entries newer than say two hours from that IP with that browser. If one exists, you should not update your counter.

[[deleted]]

I'd go for the second option. It's quite a bit of work, but you can very cleanly filter out the reloaders.

Heck, you can even make a top 10 of fake reloaders..
that would scare the hebegebes out of them :-)

[edsko]

Hi,

I don't think the second option (logging IP's) is a good option, because when people on colleges, internet cafes, etc. (i.e. different people using the same machine), or indeed all people that use a certain proxy server, will be counted as 1, which can make quite a difference.

Especially when setting the time out to, say, several days, IP's won't be the way to go, as almost all home internet users use dynamic IP's, and they will therefore not be identified correctly.

I'd go for the cookies 🙂

Edsko

[Anon]

1: you wouldn't set the TTL to several days, because if someone really did want to read that article 5 times in two days, you'd want to count that.

2: Cookies are client-side,which means I can put "accept cookies" to "no" et preto, I can spam all I want.

Just use the IP logging and don't count if a reload happens in the same hour or so.

[Anon]

Thanks all for your replies.

I do agree with you Vincet .. I will make it change every 30 minutes.

However I don't know how to get the IP address and then put the if statement ..

Can anyone give me an example of the code that should be used ?

Thanks for your help