Re: People's Choice Voting

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, James Purchase wrote:

> That's cool. Any idea of how to limit people to one vote? Can (or should) we
> limit it to votes from e-mail accounts at ISP's and cut out places like
> hotmail and/or excite, where a person can have any number of e-mail
> accounts? I'm just wondering if we should worry about "vote stuffing"?

Well, here's what I plan to do:

  1. No cookies enabled, no voting.  It's just plain turned off.
  2. No running total - those things just scream "hey, try to stuff the
     ballot box!"
  3. For each vote, the date/time, IP address, cookie, and vote is
recorded.  Given I'm expecting on the order of a few hundred votes, we can
quickly scan through this for anomolies.  For instance, if someone tries
to stuff the box by repeatedly resetting their cookie it'll be real
obvious given the same IP address.

I don't want to do anything too complicated on the voting side.  That's
why things like e-mail based registration is right out.
Originally I had a very restrictive approach that tracked cookies and IP
address and considered the same IP address similar in time to be the same
vote... but a friend of mine noted that this is very bad, because everyone
from AOL may appear to come from the same IP address.  So I figure
ALLOWING the votes but then going through and intelligently weeding out
the bogus ones may work.  It's an experiment after all.

   - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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