Poll - Vote Only Once

Thanks for the responses.

Just looked through the source code and have to agree with fernan82, it can be bypassed by someone who knows the code, or spends a little time experimenting.  Wonder if borg would consider adding a "strict" enforcement option of vote-once for polls, where IDs of voters are stored per poll.  That way you can choose to place the "important" polls under strict enforcement. 

OK...figure borg is too busy to worry about this, so I tried to make a couple of modifications.  Tested with latest version 7.01 using Access 2000, but should work on 2002 and SQL as well.  Requires some knowledge of Access databases.

Objective: When the vote-once option is checked, this will be "strictly" enforced, not through the use of cookies (which the forums currently used), but through the use of server-stored voters' IDs.  As borg indicates in another post, this may slow down your forum if there are many (in the thousands) voters.  However, this will ensure that each registered user only votes once.  Of course, some one could sign up as multiple users, but the email restrictions could prevent that.  It's highly recommended that you backup your forum and database before attempting this.

1.  Open the forum database in Access, then open the tblPoll table

2.  Add a memo field called "Vote_IDs".  Set Required to No and Allow Zero Length to Yes.

3. Replace the "poll_cast_vote.asp" in the forum directory and "poll_display_inc.asp" in the includes directory with the files below:

http://www.allersoft.com/wwf/poll_mod_701.zip

Then, you're all set.

Note that if your poll is open to "unregistered user", i.e., guests, cookies will be used to enforce single-vote, since all guests have the same ID, 2.

Should also add that for existing polls, the restriction will be applied to new voters only, i.e., if you make these changes, those who already voted CAN vote again, however, new voters will be able to vote only once.

Sounds like a good idea.  For my forums I restrict poll-creating ability to administrators only.  The voter IDs memo field could hold unlimited data.  Say one thousand voters, each ID (assuming 4 digit max, that's for a forum with up to 9999 users) takes up to 5 bytes (4 digits plus the ampersand separator), so one thousand voter IDs take 5 KB, not a huge storage/processing cost.  My implementation is somewhat "quick-and-dirty" so database cleanup is not a big priority.  But if someone could make such a mod with database cleanup, that'd be great!