I am creating a site where anyone is able to upvote and downvote content.
For the launch, I wish to not force people to create accounts in order to do this. However, without accounts, what is a reliable way to ensure people don’t vote on the same content more than once?
The methods that I’ve looked at are ip based tracking and cookie/session based tracking.
Both have problems.
I am targeting a college campus, and so many users could potentially have the same ip (through their dorm or apartment). Whereas cookies/sessions are very easily exploitable if the user deletes their sessions or even uses a script to vote.
(Being a college campus, there’s probably many tech savvy students who may do this)
As far as technology goes, are there more reliable ways to accomplish this?
You have very few options here. Cookies were invented for just this kind of thing, but as you know they can be deleted or altered by those who know how. If there were a reliable, easy way to do this, it would have a catchy name and be well documented all over the web.