You should also keep in mind that most ISPs use dynamically assigned IP addresses that can change at any time for the same user.
I agree that you must be able to identify the person. Cookies are insufficient. They can be easily cleared by the user. I use Safari, most of the time, and I reset it often which quickly and conveniently clears all cookies. As another option you could track people by using OpenID if you don't want to take on the hassles of usernames and passwords. This is what stackoverflow.com is doing. I think OpenID a great idea. But, there is a trade-off there. Setting up an OpenID initially adds even more complication to the end user than a username and password. The difference is that it's a one-time complication. The benefit to the end user is that they don't have to remember 20 passwords for 20 sites. So they will be able to use their OpenID on many other sites that support it. And for current OpenID users it involves much less complication. They only need to enter their OpenID URL and that's it. All you have to do is validate their OpenID. There's a nice OpenID gem "ruby-openid" that should make implement it fairly painless. Bharat Ruparel wrote: > I think that you want to build in an authentication system first > (restful_authentication) so that you can reliably identify who the user > is. After that it is a simple matter of logging a record in a table > that identifies that a user has voted on a specific word. So always > check beforehand if a user has voted on a word and then disallow > repeated voting. > People move around and identifying a user using just the IP address > alone is not sufficient in my opinion. > Hope this helps. > Regards, > Bharat -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
