WHOTO: Game in PHP, blocking user if lost?

[kumschick]

hi,

I wrote a nice game under php. the user my try 5 times per day! if he losts 5 times, the user will be blocked on this page! every time the user plays and looses the script put's a set a cookie with a value +1. if the value is 5 then ERROR MSG.

The princip is correct, but the problem is if the users delete the cookie, he may play again, etc...!

is there a way to save some user information that on the server?
if i use the IP address, it wont work too, since the user just need to disconnect, reconnect and the IP address won't the the same anymore so he will be able to play again. and someone that get after he's old IP address and connects to the server for playing will not be aible, cause the ip is blocked till midnight.

So how could I block the user without using cookies? We don't want that the user play to often, cause if he wins, he gets a free t-shirt! Smile!

And someone has to pay them, in this case, me! 😃

Anyone an idear?

Thx

[pjleonhardt]

keep a column in the usertable thats says how many times they have lost that day..
run a cronjob at midnight to reset it to 0 for each day

[swr]

Have the user sign up for an account. Require (and validate) an email address or credit card number or something, so they can't sign up for lots of accounts.

That really is the only reliable way to do it.

[Edit]
Once the users have accounts to log in to, you can do what pjleonhardt said.

[Weedpacket]

And to add to what pjleonhardt and swr have said; don't store anything on the client that you don't want the user to be able to mess with. As you've noted, if you leave a cookie with them, they can delete it.

[kumschick]

that's the problem, there is no mysql database for the users! there is no login etc...! The site is running mysql, but no user login is asked! 🙁 not for this website