Why do we allow multiple votes from the same IP address?
Your IP address is not unique
People often think their IP address is unique to their computer or device. It's not.
If you are using the Internet from home, you almost certainly have a router that all your devices are connected to. Typically, all devices that use that router appear to have the same IP address. Your phone, your computer, and the devices of your spouse, children, housemate, and so on, all appear to Feature Upvote to be using the same IP address.
You can confirm this by going to any "What's my IP address" site, such as this one from Proton VPN.
People share IP addresses, especially in companies
Two people accessing the internet via the same infrastructure (eg modem/router/proxy server) appear to us as having the same IP address.
This is especially the case in companies where the staff work on-premise. To the rest of the Internet, it is frequently the case that all the users in that company appear to have the same IP address.
If we had a strict one-vote-per-IP-address rule, then we'd effectively be setting a one-vote-per-company rule. As some of our customers use us as an in-house feedback tracking system, that would not be a good limit!
Our system is a little bit flexible - but not too much
We limit the number of votes per IP address in a given timeframe, and the limit is very low. We allow this so that a person can ask one or two relatives, friends, or colleagues to vote up their submission. This lets the user feel they are gaming the system while in fact, they are having little impact on the final vote.
We let people feel they've "beaten the system"
We find that some users like to find a way to manipulate the voting. So we allow a few extra votes per IP address, to give people the feeling that they've been able to "beat the system".
If we had a hard limit of 1 vote per IP address, they'd keep exploring for another method to game the system. It's a game of "cat & mouse". With our approach, we know exactly where the "mouse" (i.e the person doing multiple votes) is so that we can watch them carefully.
But there's other factors to take into account.
We do limit each IP address to a few votes
To protect your board from manipulation, we limit:
- how many votes a suggestion can receive per minute, per hour, and per day.
- how many votes can come from one IP address per minute, per hour, and per day.
This limits are low. If needed you can relax these thresholds in your board's settings.
When this is a real problem, use our vote cleaner
We have an automated "vote cleaner" that removes all duplicate votes from the same IP address, but crucially, only does it on votes that are at least a week old. We find that after a few days, people who have tried to do multiple votes stop checking, and hence don't notice that their extra votes have been removed.
The "vote cleaner" is a private setting that needs to be enabled by the Feature Upvote team. If you'd like this to be enabled for your account, simply ask our support team, and we'll do so.