How do you impliment this?

[Black_Hobbit]

I've found a great piece of code in a php coding book and I'm trying to figure out a way to control how many time users can vote.

     Since I plan to have a good number of polls, I've got this handy $poll variable. And I've decided to use cookies to only allow visiters to vote once per poll. I've got the Setting of the cookie down, but beyond that I can't get anything to work: 

<?PHP

$NumberOfPolls = 15.

if (cookie has not been set before) { 
         $poll = 1.
}
if (cookie has been set before) {
         $poll = whatever number the cookie says++;  

     if ($poll > $NumberOfPoll ) {
                print "I'm sorry, but you have already voted on all of the current Polls. Please come back soon!"; 
                   and do NOT do the rest. 
     }
}
?> End PHP

As far as how to impliment that, it baffles me. Futher on down, when the user clicks the "Submit" button, a cookie is placed with the variable $poll.

[tklopf]

something like this? (assuming you've done session_start() somewhere before here)

$maxVotes = 15;

// initialize numVotes if not set..
if(!$SESSION["numVotes"])
{
$SESSION["numVotes"] = 0;
}

if($_SESSION["numVotes"] < $maxVotes)
{
DoSomeVotingThing();

}
else
{
OutputSomeErrorMessage();
}

[tklopf]

$maxVotes = 15;

// initialize numVotes if not set..
if(!$SESSION["numVotes"])
{
$SESSION["numVotes"] = 0;
}

if($SESSION["numVotes"] < $maxVotes)
{
DoSomeVotingThing();
$SESSION["numVotes"]++;

}
else
{
OutputSomeErrorMessage();
}

[Black_Hobbit]

You mean like a session cookie?