http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=193110

Hi,

I was wondering why I can't participate in the polls anymore. I tried to vote in the past two polls, but everytime I get that someone from my IP has already voted. Now, I'm fairly (as in 99.9%) sure nobody in my dorm visits this site, so I'm thinking its a small bug in the engine...
Anybody expiriencing the same thing?

Greets,

-- JaWi

"A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs."

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Why can't I bring out my vote in the Booth of Voting?
by guha (Priest) on Aug 27, 2002 at 16:04 UTC

    I think that if we want one user - one vote, the IP-vote coupling is flawed as design, especially nowadays when ISP's rotate IP-adresses.

    Better link the vote to user id directly.

    Of course this pre-empts Anonymous Monks to participate in polls, but then who wants statistics more twisted than necessary, ;-)

    Update:
    Something is rotten in Denmark and it's not the surströmming which is a purely Swedish phenomenon.

    I just tested voting on an old poll, "My age is", which I have never voted on before and got the dreaded message "You have already voted from that IP (62.20.xxx.yyy)"

    This I find odd unless the voter-table only get reset when a new poll is out.

Re: Why can't I bring out my vote in the Booth of Voting?
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Aug 27, 2002 at 09:42 UTC
    Are you sure you aren't sharing your IP address with many others? Perhaps via a proxy or NAT box?

    Abigail

      I had the same probem as JaWi in the username vote, However I'm not behind a NAT and infact I have my own personal IP address. My dial up IP is allocated to me alone. In addition to that the last rejection due to my IP being "used already" was when there had been only 3 votes in total, so I suspect that perhaps there was a glitch somewhere.

      ---If it doesn't fit use a bigger hammer
      I had the same problem in this poll when only three or so votes had been cast. I'm on a cable connection so my IP address never changes. It said I had already voted from this IP address. When I tried voting on my laptop, (I wasn't logged in, btw) it did let me vote. Of course, the IP on my laptop is static too, but different than this one.

      Joshua

      I'm indeed behind a NAT, but the IP is `unique' for my dorm. And my housemates aren't visting this site...

      What are the measures taken to prevent voting-bots and more-than-once voting for the poll?

      -- JaWi

      "A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs."

Re: Why can't I bring out my vote in the Booth of Voting?
by earthboundmisfit (Chaplain) on Aug 27, 2002 at 14:11 UTC
    Me too...And here I was, paranoid fool that I am, thinking my boss had preempted my efforts to procrastinate by voting ahead of me :)

    We use NAT as well, but my workstation has it's own unique publicly routable IP address. My guess is that the IP check in the vote booth uses some sort of translated source filter?