How to tell if someone has voted.

[Orionsbelter]

Hi there i'm making a small voting script for members. However i'm a bit stuck. Users get to vote on a poll but only once.

 

However i'm having about 50 polls but do not know to to stop them for voting more than once. I heard of people using a text method to save all the polls IDs in one text type field in the database assigned to the members username.

 

But i still don't really understand how i could do this could someone help me please

 

Thanks for reading 

[trq]

You need a table called voted_on (or similar), then simply store a users id, and a poll id when a user votes on a poll.

[Orionsbelter]

But wouldn't that mean a lot of infomation been put into the database? Wouldn't it be overloaded it? So as if there is 50 polls and 2000 members and each of them votes on each poll that is 100,000 inserts into that table.

 

Also the polls will never get deleted nor the results.

 

 

[ignace]

Also the polls will never get deleted nor the results.

 

That is not a problem it will take a serious amount of time before you start noticing and even then you still have options like clustering and partitioning.

[trq]

Your data needs to be stored somewhere and databases are designed to store data.

[ignace]

Your data needs to be stored somewhere and databases are designed to store data.

 

Plus would your text file be faster you think without it's indexes? Not to mention it's size?