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Re: Voting on a site

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groovee@cyberdude.com writes:

> I'd like to have some buttons on my site for "voting", eg. say there
> are emoticons on a post saying "angry", "happy", "sad" - users can
> click one.

This is not going to be a client-side scripting issue so you'll need to
move the question elsewhere to get the best answers.

> Now what I'd like to prevent is users repeatedly clicking a button to
> increase the no. of votes for that button (or even worse, a script
> doing it!).

Fundamentally, you can't because nothing in this sort of interaction
knows what a person is.  I click "happy" and pass the laptop to my
friend in the cafe and she clicks "happy".  You can't tell if that was
me again or not.  And there's nothing to stop me loading the page in
every machine in a lab full of PCs and clicking "happy" on them all.

The point is that you need to decide how seriously to take this and then
pick what notion of "user" identity you can live with.

Most sites that take this seriously will use logins.  That does not
uniquely identify a person, of course, but it might do.  The trouble is
you put off casual users.  I just walk away from 95% of sites that want
me to register.  I just can't be bothered in most cases, but maybe your
content and services will be so compelling you can force people to
register in order to use some parts, like the voting.

> I'm a little confused as to how to architect this...? Do I
> set a client-side cookie when the button is clicked, say, to expire in
> 5 mins or whatever; or do I have to set up Apache (SOMEhow!) to
> prevent repeated votes coming in from the same IP or something like
> that? (I REALLY don't like this idea - it's highly likely that there
> could be 2 people who have the same IP within a small time frame -
> it's a small geographical location I'm targeting the site at, and I
> plan for the site to be VERY POPULAR!! :) )

Those two cancel each other out so you are probably not talking about a
lot of users.  That's good, because you need to store the votes on the
server.  There's really no other reliable way.

-- 
Ben.

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Thread

Voting on a site groovee@cyberdude.com - 2018-11-21 00:50 -0800
  Re: Voting on a site JJ <jj4public@vfemail.net> - 2018-11-21 16:16 +0700
  Re: Voting on a site Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2018-11-21 11:50 +0000
    Re: Voting on a site "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2018-11-21 22:26 +0100
      Re: Voting on a site Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2018-11-21 23:01 +0000
        Re: Voting on a site "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2018-11-22 12:23 +0100
          Re: Voting on a site Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2018-11-22 15:07 +0000
            Re: Voting on a site "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2018-11-22 22:42 +0100
              Re: Voting on a site groovee@cyberdude.com - 2018-11-24 04:37 -0800
                Re: Voting on a site "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2018-11-24 22:39 +0100

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