Geeklog Forums

So it seems if you use another web browser, you are able to vote more than once in a poll. And there have been times I have seen the poll plugin allow me to vote again even with the same browser. Is this because it uses cookies? Wouldn't it be a better idea to also check the IP address to prevent this from happening?

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-mono

Yes, it checks cookies. But what makes you think it doesn't also check IP addresses? What on Earth can it do if you changed your IP address (every time you re-connect online) and erased your cookies? The only alternative is for you to disable voting for anonymous users*.

* Then again, I guess the only way to do it currently is to hide the poll from them altogether.

:rtfm: How do the polls work?

From what I've seen the polls will allow a user using the same browser and IP to vote again after a few days. I've voted several times in this site's front page poll just to see if it was something related to the sites I maintain, or something global.

Dirk, why doesn't the poll also store usernames? Then registered users wouldn't be able to manipulate it at all.

For privacy reasons.

bye, Dirk

What if you just save the actual fact if they voted or not (1 or 0)? I don't think that would hurt their privacy too much.

It is possible to store only that a user has already voted for a poll and not what he has voted.

So there should be 3 possibilities:
1. IP based
2. Cookie based
3. User based

At http://fsim-ev.de we changed the polls plugin to this bahavior. You can check this out from http://fsim-ev.de/hg/geeklog (our mercurial repository)

Most polls use cookies to check who's voted, simply turning them can get around this.
Also, using the Firefox addon - iMacros - is a fantastic way to spam polls.
See a certain ED page for further lulz and information:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Poll%27s_closed

I`d distinguish between a dishonest buse and a spamming like comment spamming.

You can`t handle dishonest abuse if anonymous can also vote other than by moral. So you could write that you rely on the honesty of the voters only to vote once.

If you open the poll only for registered members then it would make sense to keep track of the voting per user-ID rather than cookies.

Can you submit a patch for this? Maybe we can get around the privacy issue by having a config option to enable or disable user based checking.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.