Implementing a voting system without requiring registration

Question

I\'d like to implement a voting system on my site, without having to force them to create an account. They would ultimately be voting up/down a piece of content which has a

Answer 1

You could try Evercookie or similar solutions.

Answer 2

Another option would be to use the session. It would allow you to store the session id in conjunction with the IP. That would allow you to get multiple IP but from different sessions. The only flaw to that would be the possible switching of browsers. Adding a cookie to make it a trio could help weed out flooding.

I have done this in the past with just IP address, which seem to work on small scale.

Answer 3

It is impossible in principle for you, using a cookie, to distinguish between a visitor who has never visited and a visitor who has visited but deleted the cookie. Consequently, any cookie-based solution will be vulnerable to trivial vote fraud.

Consider embracing this reality in the spirit of J Henry Lowengard, who, when he setup the top 100 site on WFMU back in the mid-1990s, provided a button on the "your vote has been counted" page labeled "Go Back and Vote Some More!"

In fact, go there now and vote for (or against) StackOverflow!