Posted by Marek Zawadzki on 10/31/06 19:25

Hi all.

Is it possible to implement an accurate voting mechanism (think
digg.com) that does not require users to sign in before voting?

I think for many people registering is pain and thus they rarely give
their votes online. Just look at digg and compare the number of votes to
the number of people visiting their website.
IOW what if somebody needs votes but cannot afford to bother users with
registration process?

I understand that just leaving it open for anybody is not really an
option since any jerk can ruin other users' votes just by clicking like
crazy with his mouse, but on the other hand somebody can register with
100 different names and cause identical damage.

- Limiting votes to an IP is also not perfect, since people are behind
NATs quite often (or maybe your opinion is different?).
- I was thinking about email-based authentication (when you want to
vote, system sends email which you have to confirm), where you would
need to have many email accounts to manipulate votes, but isnt' it even
bigger pain than registering?
- Maybe very long captchas? (that would require jerks to type a lot, but
still...)
- Some weird JavaScript setup that requires you to leave the site open
for a while for the vote to become active? (nah)

So (and I don't need it to be perfect every time), do you have any idea
on how to make it complicated enough that most of the jerks stay off and
it's simpler/better than registering for the good users?

Thanks,

-marek

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