[thelist] Looking for a poll

[Niklaus Haldimann]

"Luther, Ron" wrote:
> I'm thinking the best you can do is have them log into some section of your
> site and get one vote per login account ... but that ain't zactly the same
> as one vote per person.

I am right now about to code a voting application for a site. Users must
enter their email to cast a vote. The email along with a randomly
generated key are stored in a db. The user will then recieve an email
with a link, that passes their random key to a script. Only if they have
visited the link, the vote will be counted. Votes from the same email
address will not be accepted the same day again (on this particular site
users can cast one vote a day). Of course users can still use different
mail accounts, but I hope this system will prevent large scale abuse.
IMHO this is easier to code and handle than a full-blown user login
application. I can still think of a way to crack it with an automated
script though, but only an experienced programmer can do it and I'm not
gonna tell ya. ;-)

On another site I was working on we used cookies to prevent multiple
votes per person. Because everyone can turn off cookies we built the
application to work only with cookies turned on. Nevertheless someone
set up a perl script to cast several 1000 automated votes an hour -
accepting cookies can be mimicked as well as basically any other browser
behaviour.

Cheers,
N.

--
Niklaus Haldimann, Frontend Engineer
At Work: http://www.rosa.com
At Play: http://www.ubique.ch
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log-power to the WAP-people: http://www.waplog.ch