Eliminating dupe votes

[bateman]

Wonder if this is possible and if so anyone could give me a bit of a hand. I
am writing a voting system which uses cookies to prevent multiple votes,
however we all know that if someone wants to cheat the system they can quite
easily.

Because of the number of votes every night at 1am an asp page is run that
calculates the average vote for each widget and stores it in the database.
Inside this page I was thinking I could also first run a statement that
looks at the vote, selects all the votes that have both the widget id and
also the same ip address and are within a time period of each other, say 2
hours. I wouldn't want to delete them over all time as for example AOL users
would share the same IP.

Votes that are duped within this time scale would have a 0 in the fld_allow
column and can be disregarded when calculating the average.

Currently the table has fld_vote_uid (Vote UID), fld_value (int 0-10),
fld_date (auto added sql small date/time), fld_ip (users ip address),
fld_allow (auto set to 1)

Is this possible?

Many thanks

[Jeff Cochran]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2004 13:19:21 -0000, "bateman"
<bateman_ap@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote:

>Wonder if this is possible and if so anyone could give me a bit of a hand. I
>am writing a voting system which uses cookies to prevent multiple votes,
>however we all know that if someone wants to cheat the system they can quite
>easily.
>
>Because of the number of votes every night at 1am an asp page is run that
>calculates the average vote for each widget and stores it in the database.
>Inside this page I was thinking I could also first run a statement that
>looks at the vote, selects all the votes that have both the widget id and
>also the same ip address and are within a time period of each other, say 2
>hours. I wouldn't want to delete them over all time as for example AOL users
>would share the same IP.
>
>Votes that are duped within this time scale would have a 0 in the fld_allow
>column and can be disregarded when calculating the average.
>
>Currently the table has fld_vote_uid (Vote UID), fld_value (int 0-10),
>fld_date (auto added sql small date/time), fld_ip (users ip address),
>fld_allow (auto set to 1)
>
>Is this possible?

Well, yes it is. Take a look at other ASP voting scripts and you'll
find multiple methods of doing this, though all have problems. For
example, what about proxy users that all show the same IP?

Jeff