[thelist] I have cheaters on my site.

> Since can't think of any REALLY good way to get them, I decided to have a
> little fun with them instead.  If the users come from the page in my
> referer log and hit this contest page, they are immediately bounced back
to
> the original page and their ip is logged.  I can then use those IPs when I
> draw names since I log the ip with the entries.   Immature?  Sure.  But
> fun.  :^)

Sounds like it might be quite a performance hit to check the referrer
against flagged URLs (unless the URLs are hardcoded). I was originally
thinking that you would create a cron job to run a script every n minutes.
The script would grab the flagged URLs in the database and then search
whatever to see if there are any entries from users that came to the site
with a flagged referrer. Then delete the entry. Good thing about this is
that there's no hit on the user's side of things. Problem is, you seem to be
accepting entries via email and you'd have to delete email files. Is that a
problem?

Just a thought. I'd hate to see you hardcode flagged URLs. Plus, all they
have to do to get around the system is create a bounce page on a different,
unflagged domain. Or spoof the referrer... but I guess that's a problem no
matter what.



--
Matt Warden
http://mattwarden.com
me AT mattwarden DOT com