Topic Poll Module

Is there a way of blocking people from voting by IP, cookies and registration? I'm finding that some sad people are registering with differnt 'free to set up' email addresses in order to vote.

Or is there a way of adding something to the log files so I can see which IP does multiple votes? I can see that the call to vote is "POST /forum/read.php?5,685" but it's also what appears when the View Results button is clicked.

And I have the following in my logs:

217.204.192.211 - - [12/Dec/2006:09:31:06 +0000] "GET /forum/register.php?0,approve=23f9963d275 HTTP/1.1"
217.204.192.211 - - [12/Dec/2006:09:41:39 +0000] "GET /forum/register.php?0,approve=ada56e08276 HTTP/1.1"
217.204.192.211 - - [12/Dec/2006:09:51:59 +0000] "GET /forum/register.php?5,approve=988f3756284 HTTP/1.1"

which is someone registering three times I believe. Can I find out which user(s) they are?

Sorry for all the questions but cheats really annoy me

thanks

Mark



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2006 06:37AM by MarkFresh.

I don't think you can backtrace the approve URL to the username. If you suspect people from cheating, you could try blacklisting their IP-address in the admin interface (Ban Lists), so they cannot register new accounts from that IP.

In general, people will try and find ways to cheat. I suffer from that on my own site as well (where guitarists can vote for each other in guitar playing competitions). In the end, this normally turns out well, because the total number of votes is high enough to flatten out the cheaters. If the number of votes is relatively low, then I'd be really annoyed too.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Quote
mmakaay
In general, people will try and find ways to cheat. I suffer from that on my own site as well (where guitarists can vote for each other in guitar playing competitions). In the end, this normally turns out well, because the total number of votes is high enough to flatten out the cheaters.

We have the same problem with the system for electing the President in the US :P

What I'd suggest, if you're able to write modules, throw a quick logging module together which logs the username, IP, and HTTP_REFERRER/url info.
Then you can check that log and you'll be able to identify the username associated with each IP address and where they're going on your phorums.

it may be sufficient for your purposes to just add this bit of code to the poll module if that's the only place you care about.
If your phorum is very active, you'll want to avoid all this extra logging for every single transaction so the poll module makes more sense.

I uploaded version 1.0.2 of the module to the first message in this thread. Here's the changelog for this version:

2007-01-19 v1.0.2

    - Added German translation (thanks Netwalker!).

    - Added French translation (thanks Fran!).

    - Changed the maximum width for the score bars to 95% instead of 100%,
      to provide some extra space for styling the bars.

    - Fixed a bug which could cause failure to draw the graph after
      editing the poll form (showing only some undefined index
      warnings instead).

    - Added a simple rendering to the format hook for displaying polls
      inside RSS/ATOM feeds. In the feed, the poll will show up as the
      poll question.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

wow, download, install and got a poll up in about 5 minutes, excellent. Thanks for that.

Can it do >1 polls in one post?

can it do 1 poll in each post, but >1 polls in 1 thread?

just a thought,

matt

Quote
sphism
wow, download, install and got a poll up in about 5 minutes, excellent. Thanks for that.

Can it do >1 polls in one post?

can it do 1 poll in each post, but >1 polls in 1 thread?

just a thought,

matt

if we're making a features 'wishlist', I'd love to see the ability to auto-create a default poll for each new thread in specific forums

Quote

if we're making a features 'wishlist', I'd love to see the ability to auto-create a default poll for each new thread in specific forums

That sounds like something for a separate module, which tweaks the initial posting data to let it contain a poll. I don't think this is really core functionality of a poll mod.

Quote

can it do 1 poll in each post, but >1 polls in 1 thread?

Do you really want that? What's your use for that? (not judging, just curious)
IMO it'd be quite user unfriendly to let the user browse a thread to search for the polls in that thread (since a discussion can span multiple pages) and polls that are somewhere down in a thread would be answered less.

Anyway, the answer is that it's not possible to do this.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I just uploaded version 1.0.4 of the Topic Poll module to the start of this thread. Version 1.0.3 was never released, because it contained a fix for a problem that only occured with some specific ajax code that I was writing. It might also fix formatting problems for people who show the last [x] messages on a separate page, including a body preview.

The 1.0.4 version handles disabling a poll if the thread in which the poll resides is closed for posting.

2007-04-06 v1.0.4

- If a topic is closed, then the poll is closed too now.

2007-02-22 v1.0.3

- Fix for finding the raw_datestamp on 5.1 systems, in case the
messages in the format message array are from multiple forums.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

Quote
mmakaay

Quote

can it do 1 poll in each post, but >1 polls in 1 thread?

Do you really want that? What's your use for that? (not judging, just curious)
IMO it'd be quite user unfriendly to let the user browse a thread to search for the polls in that thread (since a discussion can span multiple pages) and polls that are somewhere down in a thread would be answered less.

Anyway, the answer is that it's not possible to do this.

I can see where he's going, I think. I've just installed the mod and have been playing with it; has occurred to me during testing that real-world polls about a topic often use multiple questions-- each with multiple answers-- within the same poll in order to adequately gather the information. That would be really cool, but I can see how it might complicate the module a bunch. In any case, I'm pleased with it as-is, thank you!

Have noticed one detail: looks to me like deleting a poll after voting has started, leaves the cast votes as orphans in user_custom_fields. If so, is this intentional?

Thanks-- Larry

Not intentional in a way that it really makes functional sense to keep this data in there. The data is stored in a serialized array. This means that there's no way to do a quick lookup to see what users have got poll votes in their custom profile field. For now, it would mean that the code has to go over all users that have any poll data and clean it up one by one. This could become system-unfriendly. I agree that it would be better to be able to keep things tidy, but the only way to handle that in a good way would be to store the topic poll data in its own tables in the database. Maybe something for a future release.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce