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Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by kapauldo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:29PM (#913914)
i've done this on Pikk, what i do is set a cookie as an identifier and then without login, forbid double ip-addressed based voting. upon login, if there is a cookie set, i go and harvest the votes and convert them to the logged in user. so the table Votes has a user id and a cookie user id. hope this helps. check out www.pikk.com and let me know if this is what you mean.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by genieyclo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:55PM (#913966)
Actually, this is very easily gamed:

1. Fire up Chromium in incognito, and once you've voted once, just close it again and open it again to vote once more. Rinse and repeat.

2. The ip choice is smart, but there are ways to get a dynamic ip every [insert time interval].

One could perfect this to an art really. Get your ip to start changing, have Chromium open on a hotkey, use ctrl+shift+n to go incognito (or just have it auto-load in incognito), have the poll set as your homepage. You can clock alot of votes this way.

Logins are best.

Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by gloob on Saturday October 31, 2009 @04:23PM (#914018)
This reminds me of a story.

A couple years ago, some university friends and I went to an engineering competition in Ontario. It was an event spread over four or five days, and on the last night a dance was held. This information was given to the participants a couple of weeks in advance.

The DJ for the dance had set up a website to allow people to request songs from off of a giant list. Each person got five or six "votes", and the system stopped them from voting any more after that. It was a cookie-based system. (It didn't bother with IP stuff).

One of my friends ended up using the macro system on his Macbook to vote for the song he wanted until he ran out of votes, delete his cookies, refresh the page, and repeat. He ran this macro overnight for a couple of days.

By the time we got to the competition, "Never Going to Give You Up" had three or four thousand votes. There were about two hundred people attending.

Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by Zev on Saturday October 31, 2009 @04:01PM (#913973)
One could perfect this to an art really. Get your ip to start changing, have Chromium open on a hotkey, use ctrl+shift+n to go incognito (or just have it auto-load in incognito), have the poll set as your homepage. You can clock alot of votes this way.

If someone's willing to go to that far of an extreme to game a vote, I don't think a login system would do much to stop them either. You can just as easily create new accounts with the new IP and a fake email address.

Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by barmstrong on Saturday October 31, 2009 @06:18PM (#914240)
Your're correct that it could be gamed with multiple email addresses as well. It would just take a little longer. Going to click a confirmation link, a captcha, etc.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by genieyclo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @06:24PM (#914256)
Exactly.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by genieyclo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @04:03PM (#913978)
Not really.

The difference is that with a login method, it takes significantly more effort and time. This is pretty straightforward once you have it setup.

Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by tedunangst on Saturday October 31, 2009 @04:27PM (#914025)
How does one consistently get a new IP in [time interval smaller than creating a login takes]?
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by aw3c2 on Saturday October 31, 2009 @04:34PM (#914040)
In some countries it is normal to get a new IP each time your router re-connects or even every 24 hours.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by kapauldo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @08:32PM (#914435)
to me, the point at which someone is willing to invest the effort to do this is the point at which you're popular enough to be able to shut down voting without logging in, but you're absolutely right, this is a vulnerability.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by uggedal on Saturday October 31, 2009 @05:31PM (#914151)
Pikk is a slightly offensive word in Norwegian: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by kapauldo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @08:34PM (#914437)
yeah i've heard this, i thought it was finnish, but maybe it's the same language? i'm not planning on doing much PR in norway :-)
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by barmstrong on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:36PM (#913929)
Pretty cool, definitely step in the right direction.

Is there ever a situation where a bunch of legitimate users have the same IP? I'm thinking at a university maybe, corporate firewall, or AOL?

Even so this compromise might be worth it to remove the login hurdle.

If you become Digg or something and people start actively trying to get around it, do you think this would be about as secure as logins? Could be a high quality problem to have.

Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by kapauldo on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:42PM (#913942)
that is a drawback, but all you have to do is create a login and the problem is solved. it's a compromise for sure but the problem is, one bad apple ruins the whole system, and as soon as you launch, one bad apple will come along and vote 20 times on a story by clearing their cookies. so, for me, 1 vote per IP for cookie based login or ignore IP for logins has worked out well for me. i haven't officially launched the site yet, and when i do, i am actually leaning toward requiring logins but i'll play that by ear.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by tomjen2 on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:40PM (#913940)
The dorm I live in is behind a NAT, so we all have a shared IP.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by tomjen2 on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:39PM (#913938)
Interesting site, but just a friendly word of warning: Pik (with one k) is the Danish word for 'cock', in the porn sense.
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by pbhjpbhj on Saturday October 31, 2009 @05:48PM (#914187)
Does pikmin mean anything?
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by jrockway on Saturday October 31, 2009 @03:53PM (#913964)
The site is in English, right, so I am not sure why this matters?
Re:Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? by appathy on Saturday October 31, 2009 @05:57PM (#914208)
It matters if they would like users from Norway.