Part of the DaveNet Mail website. San Francisco CA USA. 1/15/97.

Let's Have Fun -- Now! RE: SECOND SURVEY COMPLETE

Sent:1/15/97; 6:13:46 PM
From: cshotton@biap.com (Chuck Shotton)

Aside from the questions that a self-selecting survey sample raises, there is a simple way to prevent ballot box stuffing. The last 2 surveys were trivial to spoof, simply by pressing the reload button in your browser after finising the form. Take a look at how the Ga. Tech survey is done. They put only a few questions on a page, all questions must be answered before any results are saved, and the questions span multiple pages.

This technique eliminates all but the most determined of hackers and when coupled with a cookie containing user info, IP address, and a time stamp, makes it very difficult to spoof. If you had 3 pages (forms), each with results that are saved in a table along with the cookie, you could correlate all the results when the final page is submitted and use the info in the cookie to prevent different submissions by the same person. New answers would simply overwrite their old ones.

Let's Have Fun -- Now!

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