i want to create a site where it is essential that the rating system/online poll is 100% accurate.... but i was reading a thread on another forum where a girl was claiming to have fixed an online poll ( hot or not type ) so that she was 1st place, she claimed to to have used some software that had masked her ip or something to that effect. Is there anyway i can guerantee that i am only receiving 1 vote per ip for that specific month. Thanks
most poll systems will set a cookie to prevent from re-voting the only way to spoof-proof it is to allow only registered members to vote, and allow one vote per member. However, you could still technically spoof it by creating additional profiles, but that's far more work
Well, that girl you mentioned used different IPs, probably through proxies, so what you're asking now "Is there anyway i can guerantee that i am only receiving 1 vote per ip for that specific month." still holds true in her case. Cookies definitely won't do the trick, as it was suggested, only membership will, to some extent. IP recording is the best solution I think, you can always block some proxies or a range of IPs if you notice some abuses. That's what I did with the poll I wrote at least, and it works fine: samurainintendo.com/index.html#poll
I somehow doubt that it's really essential that any online poll be 100% accurate. If it is however - say political elections - the best way to go about it is to incorporate some sort of offline communication channel. Say mail all elligable voters a post card with a unique password they need to enter. Though that's still vulnerable to interception of the postcard. So - like the credit card companies do - have them telephone you from their home phone to verify that they received the card. I've been toying with some ideas for an Internet identity service which would allow anonymous but unique ids. The idea would be that people would register with myidentityservice.com and thereafter any site they went to could request their unique myidentityservice_Id. The id's would be unique per person but vary from site to site - so one person couldn't be tracked across multiple sites - and one way so that given your id on a particular site there'd be no way to track it back to a specific real life person. The fact that you'd only possibly get one Id per site would enable things like real lifetime bans from a forum and prevent multiple accounts, etc. The only problem is that such a system would be expensive to run and I'm not sure enough people/sites would want to use it to make it profitable. At any rate if it's a public poll I wouldn't go the IP address route since: a) a lot of people have dynamic addresses and b) a lot of people (eg AOL users) share a single ip address A user registration that's tied to a confirmed e-mail address is normally enough for most uses and effectively limits people to one vote per e-mail address. Sure lots of us have multiple e-mail addresses but if you want you can even block free webmail address (yahoo.com, hotmail.com) and require an address someone pays for (@comcast.net for example).