For several months I've been voting for comics by opening up a bunch of vote pages in a single go, and then clicking on each character buttons before closing that page down with a macro CTRL+W button on my mouse. I always get a little message saying that my vote was registered, but every once in a while I'd accidentally vote from the site of a comic, and that vote would also give me that message.

Today I tried to vote several times for a couple of webcomics until I eventually got the message about a vote already being registered, and by checking the vote traffic for the comics to see when my votes were counted, I can only conclude that I've been wasting thousands of clicks due to false positive vote feedback. That's pretty crappy. How could I possibly get a "vote registered" message without my vote being registered? Is there some kind of time limit on how often I can vote every minute? And if so, why don't the vote pages tell me about it?

You are allowed to vote once per comic per day. You can vote for 1000 "different" comics every day, but only once per comic. 

The vote page only tells you that as far as it can tell, everything is ok, it specifically does not tell you if the vote was valid because the only way the vote wouldn't be valid is if you tried to vote more than once every 24 hours at that point.

I changed the vote gateway months ago because I found that if the votegateway was too informative on votes that registered clicks as opposed to nonregistered clicks then the macro-writers would write ever more complicated macros to cheat, where as if I kept the information to a minimum then all the "real" voters could happily vote every day, but the cheaters would stop trying to write ever more complicated cheat scripts because they couldn't tell if the vote was being counted or not.  Even better, they'd keep voting with ineffective cheats thinking it was working and weeks or months would go by before they figured it out and tried something else.

I'm open to alternative ways to stop cheaters, but TWC  uses whatever is reasonable to keep each site getting 1 vote per user per day, and I thought this is pretty fair.

 

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

RichardM:

... because the only way the vote wouldn't be valid is if you tried to vote more than once every 24 hours at that point.

That is clearly the intention, but it's apparantly not how it works. I didn't go through that list of vote bookmarks more than once every 24 hours, since the vote feedback clearly tells me when I can vote again. And whenever I accidentally voted 'again' for a comic, and got no error message, only a few hours would've passed. Which should have been enough time for any previous vote to have been registered, but not enough time for the accidental vote to be valid. I used to think that maybe my dynamic IP had changed for some strange reason, but apparently my trust in your script was misplaced.

The first vote in my list of bookmarks seems to work every time, but every vote after the first one seems to fail. As if I'm only issued one captcha at a time or something, instead of one per page. Despite the character images and buttons being different for every page. Though when I experimented with multiple votes (one page at a time) until I got the error result, it took 3-5 votes until the vote seemed to count, so apparently there's more to it than just opening a single vote page at a time. And if the cheaters read this, I guess you'll just have to take your 'security through obfuscation' one step further, and fake the vote traffic page as well?

Would you consider a more effective way of voting for multiple comics, such as having a page with check boxes for favourite comics which has to be manually clicked/checked every day, and then voted for with a single final click of a button? In the vote traffic I saw that a few others seemed to have no referrrer, as if they too voted through bookmarks, and perhaps there would be many more if the vast majority of their votes weren't invalid without them knowing it?