how to allow only one vote for a rating system

Question

guys i have made a jquery and css based star rating system. now i cant really think of way as how to save the user vote to database. and most importantly how to limit one us

Answer 1

There seems to be no practical way to strictly enforce one vote per person on the web.

On computer networks, we often use surrogates for people. Some of them are

• network or application login,
• email address,
• IP address,
• cookies,

and so on. But all of these have problems when it comes to one vote per person.

• For web logins, a person can usually make multiple accounts. (Especially if they're free.)
• Email accounts are free, and many (most?) people now have multiple email accounts.
• IP addresses might work, but only on intranets (implemented with one IP address per computer) with unshared computers (company policy of one person per computer).
• Cookies have the same problems as web logins. (And they can be deleted by the user.)

If a vote is really valuable, some people will go to a lot of trouble to vote twice. But most votes aren't very valuable.

Answer 2

Look into structuring your database with indexes. I created a user favorite system that only allows one row to be inserted per user/favorite combination. For example: a user chooses a favorite, the values stored in the database are User ID and Favorite ID. If the user tries to select it again, the database won't insert the row as it is an exact duplicate.