janmb wrote:The way to combat this, or at least make it such a lot of hassle that it hopefully would no longer be considered worth their while, would be to:
1. Require login
2. Require an account to exist for 1 month before being allowed to post on forums
3. Require at least 50 forum posts (subtract spam) to consider an account fully operational
4. Require a fully active account in order to rank teases at all
5. 1 vote per account, lifetime, global
I think #3 is too excessive. Some people are naturally not very talkative; we still want them to vote. #2 doesn't solve anything. A person planning on winning TOTM would only create 1000 accounts the month before. #1, #4, and #5 are pretty necessary though.
It would be interesting to see if the ratings would have been different with #3 in place (pre current attacks).
If the ratings would have been the same, then #3 would serve as an additional security measure against attacks.
seraph0x wrote:I took a quick look at the logs and there is indeed a small IP block that has done a lot of votes on Cock Hero teases recently. Specifically it seems to be somebody from England using Orange Home. They are switching IPs and then voting repeatedly.
No real way to prevent this - other than engaging in an endless arms race, where I try to block them and then they use a different method to get around the block. This is why we don't elect our politicians using online polls and why "moot" is the world's most influential person 2010.
Sorry. This kind of investigating takes a lot of time and frankly I have the server issues to worry about right now.