Track a person

[The Little Guy]

I have a site where people vote, currently if two computers that are on the same network vote, my site will see them as one computer because I only track people by IP address.

 

What would be a good way to track 2+ computers with the same IP address?

[jim_keller]

There's no good way to do this, really. You could set a cookie that doesn't expire for a very long time using setcookie(), then check for it in the $_COOKIE array. However, if someone clears their cookies, they can vote again. The only half decent way of locking people out is by IP address, but obviously that is a problem if people are sharing an external IP (which they often are)

[The Little Guy]

If I did a cookie, I would just need it to last for 24 hours...

[gizmola]

This very much depends on how badly you want to suppress cheaters.  You can set the cookie expiration to be whatever you want it to be, so there's no issue setting a 24 hour cookie.  If suppression of cheating is important, then I would make sure to store the IP address in the vote row, and you can then do some queries that group by IP, and use that to remove blocks of multi-votes based on whatever threshold you decide to be gaming the vote system.