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Posted by Erwin Moller on 11/01/06 09:29
Marek Zawadzki wrote:
> 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
Hi Marek,
For what it is worth, when I was in a similar situation, I couldn't find any
foolproof solution.
IP-checking frustrates people behind 1 IP adress as you mentioned.
You can soften that restriction this a little by letting 1 vote originating
from the same IP adress every 5 minutes or so, but every programmer can
write a script that will vote every 5 minutes.
Registering and logging in are the only options that give you rudimentary
reliability.
Allow 1 loginaccount for each email.
All other solutions can by bypassed somehow and are thus unreliable.
I think you should ask yourself how important the votes are. If it is just
for fun, use an IP-block with some time-interval.
If it is important, register the users.
Of course users can register more emailadresses and scew the results, but
this is a lot of work, and you can make their life misserable by using
IP-checking in combination with registering.
To circumvent that they have to use a new IPadress and a new email for each
vote they make, probably too much work for a kid that wants to screw up
your results. :-)
Regards,
Erwin Moller
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