Re: Simple solution to voting problem?

[Robert Myers <ccrider@whiterose.net>]

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Micah Yoder wrote:

> Robert Myers wrote:
> > 
> I don't think we should permanently store every vote and IP.  Only have
> a way to check for obvious dups, like if someone clicks 'yes' twice or
> more, or runs a script like the one I posted.
> 

	I has suggested a temp table, that could be nuked as well.

> If we only allowed one vote per IP per article, it would be unfair to a
> lot of people, like people behind firewalls or large IP masq sites.  And
> people with dynamic IPs could easily vote more than once if they wanted
> to (and there's NO way to fix that in any case).
> 

	The whole problem I see is this.  Joey, the lameass guy from joe
blow high school figures our our voting system, maybe it takes him a few
months maybe it does not.  He runs a script, it bounces our numbers up for
what we are counting.  This is bad.

	I say let's track the IP's for a short time until something else
can come of it, I did take a quick look at the /. code.  I am no perl
master but this is what I found:

        if($aid>-1) {
                my $cursor = $dbh->prepare("
                        SELECT id from pollvoters where
                                qid='$qid' AND
                                id='$ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}'");
                $cursor->execute;
                
                # print $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR};

                if ($cursor->fetchrow()) {
                        $notes="You have already voted.";
                } else {
                        $notes="Your vote has been registered.";
                        $dbh->do("
                                INSERT into pollvoters
                                (qid,id,time)
VALUES('$qid','$ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}',
now())");



What do you make of that?  qid and aid are for tracking the question.

-Bob 
ccrider@whiterose.net
Systems Administrator for whiterose.net
http://www.whiterose.net