[simply rails 2] restricting multiple "diggs" from the same user?

[miloshd7]

what is the best way to restirct users, so they can cast only one vote per submission?
I've tried few things, but none of them work. only thing that does work is this line in create.js.rjs:

page.replace_html 'vote_form', "voted"

but as soon as the page is reloaded, user can vote again.

then I've tried editing the controller, so that it checks if user already voted, but I got stuck.


help?
thx

[itseasyaspie]

i think it needs to make a record in the cookies...

[miloshd7]

i think it needs to make a record in the cookies...

ok, but how

[itseasyaspie]

is the script you are using cookie based?it should say if it is, where did you down load it from?

[miloshd7]

is the script you are using cookie based?it should say if it is, where did you down load it from?

I followed 9 chapters in the Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz if that is what you mean. I know cookies are used, but I'm not sure if that means that the script is cookie based

Thanks in advance.

[mfromin]

Once you get past p. 322 in the book you will start to store the user_id of the voter with each vote. Once you have this you could easily enough search the votes table for all past votes of the user to see if they have an existing vote for the story based on user_id and story_id.

For example you can try something like this:

v = Vote.find_all_by_user_id_and_story_id(1,1)


This should get you all votes for a given user_id and story_id ... if you get an empty array (v.size == 0) you know the person has not voted for this before .... if you get any results at all (v.size > 0) they voted at least once.

This idea is easy enough to test in the Rails Console. Once you have the correct query you can just add some code in the Votes Controller 'create' method to determine if you should add a new vote or you could remove the vote button from the story page to stop them from attempting to vote. Or both for safety ;-)


...and don't EVER try to do this with cookies ... even if you persist the cookie a user can purge the cookies from their browser manually so you can never be sure a missing cookie means someone has/has not done something.

[FredJones53]

I did something like this, but decided to just filter by IP address, so once some at IP address 10.0.0.31 had voted, no-one else could vote from that IP address for the next 24 hours.

[el_toro]

Once you get past p. 322 in the book you will start to store the user_id of the voter with each vote. Once you have this you could easily enough search the votes table for all past votes of the user to see if they have an existing vote for the story based on user_id and story_id.

For example you can try something like this:

v = Vote.find_all_by_user_id_and_story_id(1,1)


This should get you all votes for a given user_id and story_id ... if you get an empty array (v.size == 0) you know the person has not voted for this before .... if you get any results at all (v.size > 0) they voted at least once.

This idea is easy enough to test in the Rails Console. Once you have the correct query you can just add some code in the Votes Controller 'create' method to determine if you should add a new vote or you could remove the vote button from the story page to stop them from attempting to vote. Or both for safety ;-)


...and don't EVER try to do this with cookies ... even if you persist the cookie a user can purge the cookies from their browser manually so you can never be sure a missing cookie means someone has/has not done something.

This seems to be the best way to limit the voting. I don't think limiting the votes by IP address really helps solve the problem.

How would it be possible to modify the votes controller create action to prevent a user from voting on a story more than once?

[dnectom]

I add the following code to the stories_controller.rb

  
  def show
  	v = Vote.find_all_by_user_id_and_story_id(session[:user_id],params[:id].to_i)
  	@voted = !v.empty?
  	@story = Story.find(params[:id])  	
  end

Then simply modified the show.html.erb file to do a check whether @voted is set or not and either display the vote form.. or an already voted element..