Good afternoon from Spain, guys.
I will try to be as specific as possible.
I want to create a free physical product in my ecommerce (WP + WC) for which I will only charge a couple of dollars for shipping.
To avoid cheating, apart from checking fields such as email and selling the product individually, I was wondering if it is possible to display a notice such as "IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO MAKE MORE THAN ONE PURCHASE WITH THE SAME IP"
Any ideas?
Thank you :-)
Check this code out to restrict same-IP purchases.
That said - if your aim is to restrict purchases to one user, your best bet is to validate the user themselves (email/username).
The reason for this is:
It's possible for one user to unintentionally access a page through many IPs (say VPN disconnects)
It's possible for many users to use the same IP (via NAT).
IP should not be used for validation such as this.
And if you're already using emails, that should be good enough.
Related
So the following which I'm writing is just to discuss whether something like this is even possible or if any of you would have any better ideas/suggestions or understanding how this might work. I thank anyone who takes time to read this in advance and I hope I don't explain myself too incoherently:
Let's say I have a page in WordPress which has a little bit of text and a video. Basicly I would like to share that page's link or I'd want to forward that page via e-mail to a certain group of people (let's say 10-50 specifically chosen people) and I want to track who of them opened the link and for how long they were on the page or watched the video.
I would like to make this happen in a way that I wouldn't have to make 50 different pages or 50 different URLs for each person (or 50 different tracking strings for that matter). Or that I wouldn't have to take a newsletter-mailer type page in between this process.
Basicly, I would like to make the sharing/forwarding and analytics overview process as easy as possible, so that an admin or moderator wouldn't have to check too many different pages to get the info.
I really appreciate any and all feedback.
[Also really sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. Please feel free to redirect me to a corresponding slot].
Technically, Google Analytics isn't meant to be used to track this specifically- it's typically meant to track groups of anonymized users. That being said, it is capable of doing this (but may not be as automated as you had hoped).
You are correct in thinking that you'd either need to duplicate the pages or create multiple different campaign URLs.
The other thing to keep in mind is that as emails are forwarded, there is no way to update the URL after the email has been sent, so if you email me and I forward it to someone else who clicks through, you're going to think someone else is me.
One way around this would be if you know your users IP addresses (not only is that a big "if", but it can also be spoofed), or some other uniquely identifying feature (any chance these people have signed-up through your website and have actual user IDs? That'd make things infinitely easier!).
Maybe you could customize the email to add their email address as a query string? That could still require a lot of work (and you couldn't just share a single link).
Now, you can not store personally identifiable info in GA (including IP and email addresses), but at the server-level you could assign a custom dimension with a uniquely generated ID and send that to GA. Now you've got all the info you need!
Unfortunately this method only works if you can detect some kind of "fingerprint" of your users.
Unfortunately what you described isn't quite what Google Analytics was designed to do. If you wanted to get into detailed user-specific tracking, I'd advise you look into a CRM. Those systems are designed specifically for user tracking as you described.
Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.
There are two Swiss (.ch) websites, let's call them A and B. A is owned by me and B by a customer.
Because of legal data protection issues B is hosted in Switzerland and not allowed to store any user information abroad. Which means that software like Google Analytics is not available on B. A is a Swiss website but hosted in a (European) cloud.
Now we would like to find out how many common users we both have over the duration of 30 days. In short:
numberOfUsersA ∩ numberOfUsersB
For the sake of simplicity: Instead of users we are perfectly happy to measure common browsers.
What would you suggest is the simplest way to solve this problem?
First off all, best regards from Zurich/Zug :) Swiss people are everywhere...
I don't think you're correct that it's not legal to collect data in Switzerland at all (also abroad). As I'm working in the financial industry I know this topic very well and we also had to do a lot research to use GA at all.
It's always the question what and how you collect data. What you can't do - beside you got in upfront the permission of the user - is storing personal identifiable information. That's anyway not allowed by GA - you can't import/save in custom dimension/metrics for example email addresses.
Please check https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6156630?hl=en as general basic information about this topic.
If you save the IP addresses via IP anonymization, you shouldn't run into problems if you're declaring this in your data-privacy statements. Take this approach: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
I'm not a lawyer and also not want to give you legal advises, but ours told us that's fine. If you are real paranoid about sending data to the USA - like we have to be - you can exclude your tracking from very sensitive forms.
To go back to your basic question, if you want to find this out via Google Analytics, your key is "cross domain tracking". Check https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en for more information in this direction.
The only work-around I have in my mind beside this, is if you start collecting browser-fingerprints yourself and then connect both collections over the finger prints together (that's not save, as your visitors will use more than one device/configuration). I personally would go for the IP anonimization, exclude very sensitive forms and ensure that your data-privacy declaration contains all necessary parts for and offer an opt-out option then you should be on the safe side.
All the best and TGIF :)
I'm planning to use paypal payment method together with ubercart, in order to not have to take care about security issues.
1)
I need to store the customers addresses in order to know where to ship the products.
I was wondering if I can let customer insert the addresses in paypal, and then somehow get them, or I should ask the customer to fill this information in the website instead... how ?
2) I need to test the checkout process. Is paypal offering a "testing proccess" in which I can see what happen without inserting credit cards numbers ?
thanks
1) People must give a delivery and billing adress in ubercart during checkout. There is also a nifty module wich let's user store different adresses and then choose wich one they want when checking out: http://drupal.org/project/uc_addresses
2) Yes, you can choose this option in the ubercart paypal module settings(sandbox mode) and you need to register here: https://developer.paypal.com/
I'm building a small application that highly depends on anonymous user voting on some sort of items. It's so small that requiring registration would be tedious and could not be justified.
Anyway, I did some research on this, including a search here on stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=anonymous+votes), and doesn't seem that there's a satisfying answer.
My question is: are there any security measures that I can apply to prevent gaming anonymous votes?
One thing comes to mind is CAPTCHA, but I'd like to avoid that since users will vote on multiple items in a very short period of time, and CAPTCHAs will just annoy them.
Another thing I thought of is limiting the number of votes per minutes from a single IP (in addition to a cookie), but not sure how this is going to work.
Any thoughts?
There are a few ways I've seen work:
Email registration : you get their email, they need to confirm their vote. The combination of their IP + email makes a unique record that they can't then use to vote again (for the same poll).
Captcha : without having additional checks (IP, etc), it's easy enough for a team of monkeys to successfully enter a lot of captchas.
Site Registration : without account creation level limits (e.g. a non-free email account required for signing up) people can just create multiple accounts.
Depending on how you weigh up the cost of getting users to vote vs making sure their votes are for them and them alone, you can use a different level of vote-spam-protection.
You can use the CAPTCHA once to both confirm the vote and create a session with the IP and cookie.
Any time you are dealing with anonymous voting you are going to have an imperfect solution but you can shoot for "pretty good". Consider dropping a cookie on the client computer to prevent multiple/frequent voting and back this up by performing server side IP tracking to do the same. Do not allow anyone to vote that has cookies blocked.
Of course, if you require complete accuracy or if the voting involves awarding of something of monetary value, registration is really the way to go.
I'm working on a web-based contest which is supposed to allow anonymous users to vote, but we want to prevent them from voting more than once. IP based limits can be bypassed with anonymous proxies, users can clear cookies, etc. It's possible to use a Silverlight application, which would have access to isolated storage, but users can still clear that.
I don't think it's possible to do this without some joker voting himself up with a bot or something. Got an idea?
The short answer is: no. The longer answer is: but you can make it arbitrarily difficult. What I would do:
Voting requires solving a captcha (to avoid as much as possible automated voting). To be even more effective I would recommend to have prepared multiple types of simple captchas (like "pick the photo with the cat", "what is 2+2", "type in the word", etc) and rotate them both by the time of the day and by IP, which should make automatic systems ineffective (ie if somebody using IP A creates a bot to solve the captcha, this will become useless the next day or if s/he distributes it onto other computers/uses proxies)
When filtering by IP you should be careful to consider situations where multiple hosts are behind one public IP (AFAIK AOL proxies all of their customers through a few IPs - so such a limitation would effectively ban AOL users). Also, many proxies send along headers pointing to the original IP (like X-Forwarded-For), so you can take a look at that too.
Finally, using something like FSO (Flash Shared Objects - "Flash cookies") is obscure enough for 99.99% of the people not to know about. Silverlight is even more obscure. To be even sneakier, you could buy an other domain and set the FSO from that domain (so, if the user is looking for FSO's set by your domain, they won't see any)
None of these methods is 100%, but hopefully combined they give you the level of assurance you need. If you want to take this a level higher, you need to add some kind of user registration (which can be as simple as asking a valid e-mail address when the vote occurs and sending a confirmation link to the given address and not counting the votes for which the link wasn't clicked - so it doesn't need to be a full-fledged "create an account with username / password / firs name / last name / etc").
No, you can't, and it only takes one person and a willing forum to change the outcome of an online vote.
You have to realize the inherent flaws of an online vote and rather than attempting to get around them try to use them to your advantage.
-Adam
You can certainly make it difficult.
What about building a user profile with such things as ip address, browser useragent, machine name, and whatever other information you can get.
Store the profile for each user, then if you receive a profile which is similar enough to one already in the database (you'll have to tweak that) you can throw out that vote.
I imagine you can probably build a better profile using silverlight, though I'm not sure what information that gives you access to.
Client-side solutions are out for the reasons you listed -- they can be manipulated by the user. Server-side solutions -- as you said -- can be fooled and bypassed.
If you're willing to accept the fact that you can't really be 100% sure that you're getting exactly one vote per person, then there are some measures you can take to reduce the noise.
Use a CAPTCHA in your vote-submission form to make it harder for bots and scripts to vote.
Limit the number of votes per IP address to one.
Consider requiring registration in order to vote. (I know this defeats part of your original question, but it gives you a greater degree of control over the voting.)
That's a good start.
my personal experience in contest developing and monitoring tells me that no, there is no reliable way to avoid cheating if you let anonymous users vote (or do anything that lets them participate in the contest).
you could play with IP, introduce delays between an action and the next, but it's really difficult: the best way is introduce a captcha or something similar, if applicable in your particular situation.
best of all, don't let anonymous users participate: let them "play" and access to a simulation, but the contest needs a login.
Nope, it's the user's computer and they're in control.
Unfortunately the only solution is to bring it back on your court so to speak and require authentication.
However, a CAPTCHA helps limit the votes to human users at least.
Of course even with authentication you can't enforce single voting because then they teach the bots to register...
I have to agree that the short answer is no...though if you look at my recent answer here: How to anonymously identify a user and store that information you certainly can get it within a 6 percent margin of error.