Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney on 02/24/05 19:38

* Jacques <admin@hrfocus.co.za>:
> How can I ensure that a user is prevented from creating a second profile
> after he has registered a second time with different registration details?
>
> I thought of capturing his IP Address and checking this value against my
> users table in my database where I have captured IP Addresses of users who
> have previously registered.

IP address is very unreliable -- most large ISPs and corporations use
proxy servers, so all users appear to come from a single IP address (or
a small group of IP addresses).

You could possible consider setting a cookie on the user -- but that's
not even a foolproof method as the cookie could be manually deleted by
them or they could use a different computer to create a profile.

Basically, this is an unsolvable problem unless you can control the
network (i.e., it's only running on a LAN and you KNOW the IP address
won't change for their machine).

--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney | WEBSITES:
Webmaster and IT Specialist | http://www.garden.org
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802-863-5251 x156 | http://nationalgardenmonth.org
mailto:matthew@garden.org | http://vermontbotanical.org

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