How Voting is Controlled

Voting is limited to one vote per IP address. Rather than go through the process of requiring each visitor to this site to sign in every time they wanted to do anything, I figured it just as easy to control by genuine IP address. (Masked IP's are ignored).

This does have a couple of inherent weaknesses in that it may inadvertantly prevent genuine votes from occuring if, for example, multiple users access this site from the same company and that company's system broadcasts with a single IP address. The second is that anyone from a regular home DSL or cable connection will pick up a different IP each time they connect to their ISP. (Connect in this instance means router/modem connection. If you leave your router/modem connected then you keep the same IP address. In other words, it doesn't just reset each time you reboot your computer). Anyway, such a user would be able to vote multiple times.

Rather than try to police this, as, to be honest, it's rather unlikely that we're going to get hundreds of votes, we are allowing this control to be bypassed. If you enter a vote from an IP address that has already submitted a vote, you will see a warning/error message telling you that a vote has already been registered from that IP address. You will then be allowed to enter a name to have the vote registered with that same IP address. You just have to enter something here that has not been entered from that IP address. If you inadvertently enter the same name and IP address as one that has already submitted a vote, you will get a more sarcastic error message with a list of all entries from that IP, thus enabling you to pick something that has not been entered previously and to also see who is stealing your thunder.

So EBR is currently happy with this method of Validating Against Genuine IP Named Addresses, but we're always open to suggestions for improvement. (I seem to think there's an acronym here somewhere, but I'm just not seeing it).