Rating system

Right... I have an articles system, that I want to implement a + - ratings system into.
How would I go about limiting each visitor to 1 vote per article? - The site doesn't use a membership system.

One solution was to store the visitor's IP into a table, then when they voted, check the IP isn't in the table before counting the vote. But, if the site became fairly large, it'd take a while to process it.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

have a free registration to rate, ips or cookies are the only other way

Membership system would be too much hassle.
Cookies were another idea, but I'd just like to weigh up my options before making a final decision.

On Vote Do This
1. Check For Cookie
2. If No Cookie
--Process The Vote
--Set Cookie "voted"

If Cookie = Voted
--echo 'youve already voted';

That would work for a single thing. If you wanted to make it once for each item.. you would set a variable in the cookie. so

setcookie with voted_id=1 as the data and then check for the cookie using another variable. I can do this for ya if you need for a small price. or you can find your way through that.

GL

you could try tracking each member by ip address. create a db that stores the ip address and if the ip exist in the db they can not vote again

red his post he already thought of that but doesnt want to do that due to the size it would potentially be. Yoiu could do that and make a CRON to empty the db every week or month, thats what I would reccomend

what about if he uses session. Create a session script that will create session cookie and set it to expire when ever. When the user votes it save his session id or cookies id in a db to track users votes

I've got a cookies system working now. Thanks all!