I don't think that this is how it works. There is a limit to the number of cookies you can rely on a single computer to be able to store, but this would not become an issue unless there are a WHOLE lot of computers behind a single gateway all simultaneously accessing perlmonks, and that these cookies are stored hashed by IP, with perlmonks noting the number of cookies assigned to a single IP and cutting it off when it's hit the magic number (6 I think, though that seems an odd number since it isn't a power of 2) (also unlikely, dialup users do not keep the same IP, as you noted.) Though you might have to resign in or something, still, MANY computers, simultaneously.

The voting nodelet would be tied to your userid in any sane system (and I assume that this is what was done). IPs are too dynamic for most users to rely on, as has been said before, this site has been around since the time that just about everyone was on dialup. Also, cookies expire, as soon as a user reset their cookies, which would allow them to vote again, which isn't a good thing. People would REALLY cheese on the XP if our only way of hashing votes was against the cookie.

Your presence on the site is detected through the use of cookies, which is the only way to do this because of the nature of the HTTP protocol. The IPs are relatively meaningless because HTTP is transmitted via both UDP and TCP, and should be considered connectionless. The votes are hashed against a userid (or should be), because this can be considered permanent and to be a good primary key.

Of course, I hope I answered your question, it certainly was a good one as many people don't understand exactly what is going on with such systems.

UPDATE!!

Holy smokes. Sorry about that, I thought that you were talking about voting on individual nodes, as in the Voting/XP system. Yeah, the voting booth is apparently implemented quite differently... I could stack the vote there with little difficulty. I can see how that would be a difficulty behind a proxy/gateway if there were multiple users of perlmonks behind it!

Just Another Perl Backpacker

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.