Double Voting on Survey

[alex_samanta]

Hello,

I have created a survey system for my site. Right now, I'm wondering as to which way would be best for preventing people to vote in the survey twice. Should I use cookies to track who had already voted, and who had not voted. Should I log the voter's IP addresses in a MySQL database, and would I be able to search the database quickly for any matches to prevent any people that have already voted from voting.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[van__]

That's a tricky question.

If you do it by IP, what about the guy sitting in a cubicle across from the guy who last voted? And then the guy sitting behind a proxy, who's IP just changed between page requests? And let's not forget modem users and even most the DSL/cable users have dynamic IP's, though some do get static, most use DHCP and get new addresses everyday, or at some interval.

Not reliable at all.

So then we have cookies...
if and when their browser accepts it.
And if it did get accepted, did they clear their cache?

So no, neither of these will ever allow you to keep users from abusing your system.

If it means that much to you, require a login to vote. And make sure people logging in from Florida log in twice just to make damn sure they don't mess with your ballots 🙂

[Anon]

HAHAHA! Nice one Van...
Zig's