Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 11/02/06 13:09

Gordon Burditt wrote:
>>[...]
>>
>>>You could try a "I voted on this survey" cookie. If you insist that they
>>>accept cookies before even SEEING the survey, this might work well enough
>>>for your purposes. They are, however, easily defeatable.
>>
>>I am sorry, I don't quite get this idea, could you give more details?
>
>
> It's very simple (and very defeatable). For each different thing
> they can vote on, define a cookie name, like
> "I_VOTED_FOR_Benbrook_DOG_CATCHER_PLACE_53". Perhaps you want to
> make this a bit less obvious. If you try to vote for Benbrook Dog
> Catcher Place 53 (the place has really gone to the dogs if it needs
> 53 dog catchers) and this cookie is ALREADY set, they're trying to
> vote twice for this race. After they vote, set that cookie.
>
> This tries to enforce one vote per computer. Or perhaps one per
> computer account, if they've got different profiles. That's a
> better approximation to one per person than one vote per IP.
>
> This works (a little) better if you insist that they turn on cookies
> before they get to the vote pages. It's easy to defeat if the user
> is asked whether to accept cookies and he refuses any set after you
> submit the voting page.
>
> You could perhaps use this in conjunction with IP checking. For
> example, you might allow votes from a given IP more often if they
> don't have the cookie and haven't been trying to duplicate-vote
> recently according to the cookie.
>
>
>>And one more question, maybe more on the psychological side - what
>>actually stops these kids from manipulating digg's content? I guess
>>opening 100 accounts shouldn't take too much and it should be enough to
>>get any link on top of the list?
>
>

Doesn't work at all. For instance, I have my systems set up to clear
all cookies when the browser is closed. And I could also go in and
clear the cookies manually at any time.

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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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