Re: voting script

I wrote a vote app for SXSW's website competition where I only wanted 'one vote per person...period'. I required a 'vote registration' where the user typed their email address and php immediately sent them a randomly-generated password to use in order to vote. At the same time, it loaded the 'ballot' page, where it auto-filled their email address and waited for their password and vote. Upon receiving their vote, it logged their email to a database, as well as incrementing the record they'd voted for. One guy who ran his own server exploited this by creating email addresses 1@x.com, 2@x.com, 3@x.com......1568@x.com. I eventually noticed this and wrote a script to find out exactly how many time's he'd voted and de-cremented the appropriate record in addition to blocking that domain entirely. David Rose webmaster, SXSW.com Apathy wrote: > > Hi, > I'm not sure if this has a PHP solution or not, I thought I'd bounce it > off the people of this group though... > > I have a site that gives users the ability to vote on sections of the site. > This is done by a php script that adds 1 to the "vote" field on a MySQL > database. > > What I want to do is have a system that stops people from voting on each > section more than once (i.e. cheating). > > I was going to do something that logged their ip for each section and would > stop multiple votes -- this would cause problems for people behind company > firewalls though, and also cause *huge* logs. Then I thought maybe sending a > cookie when they voted that would notify the script if they tried to vote > again -- this seems like the most feasible idea *I* have come up with so > far, I was wondering whether anyone has had better solutions for a similar > situation though? > > Thanks in advance for any help, > > Robert Morrissey > > -- > Crazy Moose > http://www.crazymoose.co.uk > Providing Web Design, Hosting and IT Support > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net