Only allowing a person to vote once???

[mahangee]

Okay, I making this system where people can rate/vote for things. And was wondering what methods you can use to only allow them to vote once.

I currently am using cookies, and putting their IP into a database then checking off before I allow the person to vote. Does anyone know of any other methods, that I could use to protect my poll from fraudulant votes. If you do please elaborate.

Thanks in advance.

[oblivious]

Well the IPB poll works by storing that you voted already in the mySQL database. If you username matches, then you can't vote again. I'm assuming you don't have member registration, so your best bet is to continue what you are doing since most IPs arn't dynamic. You will just need to have a range for the IP so you don't have people voting again when they reset their computer.

Recording the IP doesn't do anything half the time anyways, many times I switch proxies, sometimes 3 times a day and I could just vote again, plus there would be no IP to record.

People will always cheat, but it kinda depends on the data you are collecting, if it is extremely important, then they must register, if it's not, stick with the method you are using :D

[mahangee]

Well thats reassuring. :D

Just 1 question about proxies (excuse the noobishness of it :D ) would it be correct in think that proxies only change the end of the IP? For example say my IP was 123.456.78.90 and I was on a proxy I could change it to 123.456.78.11

[oblivious]

no, you can get completely annonymous proxies where no one can see your IP. Proxies change your IP, Proxies do lots of things. People use them to hide activities they do on the internet and if you were doing something illegal, you would still get caught because you would just have to do a scan of the IP range.

I use russian proxies many times because some russian sites only allow local users to connect, so with the proxie, it makes it look as if I come from russia :D Crazy world we live in when I can be here, but have an IP from Russia :P

I don't use Proxies all the time only because they go down frequently and it's slower then using a normal internet connection because you are connecting to another remore server and then connecting to the internet.