[PHP] count clicks to count most important news
I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor?
Re: [PHP] count clicks to count most important news
On Jan 1, 2012, at 11:26 AM, muad shibani wrote: I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor? Not a fool-proof method, but use Javascript on the client-side to stop users' from continuous clicking. Then create a token and verify the click on the server-side before considering the click as being acceptable. Cheers, tedd _ t...@sperling.com http://sperling.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] count clicks to count most important news
On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 11:49 -0500, Tedd Sperling wrote: On Jan 1, 2012, at 11:26 AM, muad shibani wrote: I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor? Not a fool-proof method, but use Javascript on the client-side to stop users' from continuous clicking. Then create a token and verify the click on the server-side before considering the click as being acceptable. Cheers, tedd _ t...@sperling.com http://sperling.com There are still problems with this, GET data (which essentially only what a clicked link would produce if you leave Javascript out the equation - you can't rely on Javascript) shouldn't be used to trigger a change on the server (in your case a counter increment) I did something similar for a competition site a few years ago, and stupidly didn't think about this at the time. Someone ended up gaming the system by including an image with the clicked-through URL in the src attribute, and put that on their MySpace profile page, which had more than a few visitors. Each of those visitors browser attempted to grab that image which registered a click, and because of the number of unique visitors, the clicks were registered as genuine. I'd recommend using POST data for this reason, as it's a lot more difficult for people to game. -- Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
Re: [PHP] count clicks to count most important news
On 01-01-2012 20:08, Ashley Sheridan wrote: On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 11:49 -0500, Tedd Sperling wrote: On Jan 1, 2012, at 11:26 AM, muad shibani wrote: I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor? Not a fool-proof method, but use Javascript on the client-side to stop users' from continuous clicking. Then create a token and verify the click on the server-side before considering the click as being acceptable. Cheers, tedd _ t...@sperling.com http://sperling.com There are still problems with this, GET data (which essentially only what a clicked link would produce if you leave Javascript out the equation - you can't rely on Javascript) shouldn't be used to trigger a change on the server (in your case a counter increment) I did something similar for a competition site a few years ago, and stupidly didn't think about this at the time. Someone ended up gaming the system by including an image with the clicked-through URL in the src attribute, and put that on their MySpace profile page, which had more than a few visitors. Each of those visitors browser attempted to grab that image which registered a click, and because of the number of unique visitors, the clicks were registered as genuine. I'd recommend using POST data for this reason, as it's a lot more difficult for people to game. I agree, POST data is indeed the way to go here. Personally, I would use a like image-like thing which is actually a button, using some clever javascript (personally I would use jquery for this) you can then POST data to the server based on the click. Then set a cookie which disables the button (and keeps it disabled on future visits). This should prevent average person from repeatedly clicking it. You could also log the person's IP adress and filter based on that aswell; combining various methods would be best in this case I think. To prevent the method which Ashley mentioned, using POST data isn't enough. You would want to guarantee that the link came from YOUR server instead of some different place. There are multiple ways to do this: - use a unique key as an argument in the POST which can only be clicked once. Register the key in a database before serving the page, and then unregister it once it has been served and clicked. Though if a person were to repeatedly open the page, your cache would be exhausted, and the method would become useless. - require a referrer address to come from your domain; also reasonably easily circumvented in this case - there are more, but it really depends on how much effort you want to put into preventing attacks and how much effort you expect others to put into attacking it. For example, large sites like youtube are sure to use extensive measures to prevent people from spam-clicking in any way. While sites that only cater to say 3 visitors a month don't require all that effort in the first place. Hope that helps, - Tul -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] count clicks to count most important news
On 1 Jan 2012, at 16:26, muad shibani wrote: I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor? I'm assuming this is not a voting system, and the news items you're counting are sourced from your own site and, with all due respect to Ash, unlikely to be a target for false clicks. All you're really wanting to do is prevent the site from registering multiple hits from the same user in a short period of time. I would probably use memcached on the server-side to store short-term information about clicks. When a news item is loaded... 1) Construct the memcache key: newsclick_article_id_ip_address. 2) Fetch the key from memcache. 3a) If it does not exist, log the hit. 3b) If it does exist, compare time() with the value and only log the hit if time() is greater. 4) Store the key with a value of time() + 300 and an expiry of the same value. This will prevent hits being logged for the same news item from the same IP address within 5 minutes of other hits. Other alternatives would be to use cookies (could get messy, and not very reliable since it requires the response from click 1 to be processed before click 2 gets started), Javascript (as suggested by tedd but without the token - it would work pretty well and would be a lot easier to implement than the above, but you sacrifice having full control over it). If I'm interpreting the requirement correctly my solution is almost certainly overkill, and a simple Javascript solution would be more than sufficient. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] count clicks to count most important news
All the answers are great but Stuart Dallas' answer is what I was asking about .. thank u all I really appreciate it a lot On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Stuart Dallas stu...@3ft9.com wrote: On 1 Jan 2012, at 16:26, muad shibani wrote: I have a website that posts the most important news according to the number of clicks to that news the question is : what is the best way to prevent multiple clicks from the same visitor? I'm assuming this is not a voting system, and the news items you're counting are sourced from your own site and, with all due respect to Ash, unlikely to be a target for false clicks. All you're really wanting to do is prevent the site from registering multiple hits from the same user in a short period of time. I would probably use memcached on the server-side to store short-term information about clicks. When a news item is loaded... 1) Construct the memcache key: newsclick_article_id_ip_address. 2) Fetch the key from memcache. 3a) If it does not exist, log the hit. 3b) If it does exist, compare time() with the value and only log the hit if time() is greater. 4) Store the key with a value of time() + 300 and an expiry of the same value. This will prevent hits being logged for the same news item from the same IP address within 5 minutes of other hits. Other alternatives would be to use cookies (could get messy, and not very reliable since it requires the response from click 1 to be processed before click 2 gets started), Javascript (as suggested by tedd but without the token - it would work pretty well and would be a lot easier to implement than the above, but you sacrifice having full control over it). If I'm interpreting the requirement correctly my solution is almost certainly overkill, and a simple Javascript solution would be more than sufficient. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ -- *___* * * السجل .. كل الأخبار من كل مكان www.alsjl.com صفحة السجل على فيسبوك http://www.facebook.com/alsjl *Muad Shibani* * * Aden Yemen Mobile: 00967 733045678 www.muadshibani.com
