Family with 5 accounts - Can they vote for my ad or will that trigger a cheat-detect?

Question

Five people who've been addicted to my server for months, dad and 4 kids, and they want to be able to vote for my ad each day (or at least 3 of them per day will) -- i imagine the system allows for a couple playernames per ip, it would have to - half of my players are siblings, my own house has two accounts in it, etc -- but has a 'i think you're faking names' system in place that kicks at some point.

I understand if you would be reluctant to say in public "Oh you can vote up to n times from the same ip without it being caught as cheating" since then, well, time for people to ramp up the vote by saying "here is a list of 8 names bob, you vote with those, and sam, you take those 8 playernames from our member base, and make sure to vote each day..." etc.

What can/should I tell this family they can do to maximize their helpfulness and minimize their troublesomeness

Would it be something really only a significant problem if their 5 votes made up 5/6 of the votes on a given day, or the first 5 votes, and less significant if I told them "dont vote until there are at least n votes made first" ...

 

Suggestions - recommendations - limitations.  And a direct email to this forum account email is suitable to not answer this in public if you are reluctant to give a firm answer of any sort that could be problem-inducing one way or the other.

Answer 1

Thanks for the long question, I have had to restrict it to only allow 1 IP to vote daily. And the same playername can also only vote once pr. day.

This is the best way to do it in my opinion after several tests. In some special cases like this, the system will simply stop you from Voting with more users if they try from the same PC. Most people do have several places to connect from (home,work, school, library, mobile phone etc), so they ought to be able to figure out a system so everyone can vote daily.

Comments

Okay thats good to know -- I hope then by 'restricted to one ip' means that the form doesn't accept it, rather than ding after-the-fact
I'll post information to this effect on my website for those players and all the siblings I have.  And I'll make my wife connect to the neighbor's unprotected wireless connection to do her voting :)

---

actually no, the check first occurs after the Vote is made.

was made like this to reduce database lookups and enhance pageload speed.
But I will try and think of a good and efficient way to make a check if an IP has voted and only show the Vote button if the IP can vote.