Storing “votes” in a database

Question

I\'m writing what will be an intranet application, and one of its features is roughly analogous to content voting - not unlike what SO, Amazon, and many other sites do.

Answer 1

You will probably also want the ID of the author of the content in the table, for easier detection of voting abuse. (Yes, this is presumably redundant information. An alternative is regularly building a summary table to see who is voting on whom.)

For what it's worth, the perlmonks vote table looks like this:

 `vote_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `voter_user` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `voted_user` int(11) default NULL,
 `weight` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `votetime` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
 `ip` varchar(16) default NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY  (`vote_id`,`voter_user`),
 KEY `voter_user_idx` (`voter_user`,`votetime`),
 KEY `voted_user_idx` (`voted_user`,`votetime`)

(vote_id is the content id, ip is an IP address.)