Voting fairly???

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002 6:08 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

Need some advice.

We run a poll on our Fancy Rats message board for our rat of the month competition which is limited to members only. (cunning way to get people to join)

Anyway, this month's poll only started yesterday and it already has an unusually high number of votes half of which go to one rat. Being suspicious I thought I would check the DB in phpMyadmin to see who had been voting.

I believe I have stumbled across a plot to unfairly win the competition. It would appear someone has been registering new accounts simply to get extra votes. The evidence:
- I don't normally get that many members joining in such a short space of time.
- Two of the encrypted IPs appear twice (I assume because they came from the same seed)
- email addresses - providers are the same on two pairs of accounts

Ok so its all a bit circumstantial and could just be a coincidence but I don't think so.

So what should I do, I would hate to see this rat win by foul play but I have no evidence to prove otherwise - No one else will know any different, but it just doesn't seem right.

I guess I'll see how voting goes over the month if this rat loses the lead I would expect a sudden influx of new users!

Why doesn't phpBB have the option to stop users with the same IP voting twice?

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Well what I would do is get the list of people who voted for that particular rat, and then look at each user and look for similarities. If some of these users have posted, you can compare their IPs... If you find more than about two people who voted for the same rat, and have the same IP, I think you can assume that it's cheating... Also look at the join date (if it's someone cheating, all the users will probably have joined around the same time...).

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002 6:20 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

They have all been in the last few days, 2 today one right after the other (shameless)

None of these users have posted (suspicious in itself), so I cant get the IPs that way. Although one of the potential aliases was just online so I made a note of the IP from the admin panel.

Am I right in thinking that if the encrypted version of th IP in the voters table is the same then so is the original IP?

I guess I will just have to keep an eye on the situation. Shocked

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

No idea how the IPs are in the voters table... Didn't even know there were any Embarassed