Why do we allow multiple votes from the same IP address?

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 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.

People share IP addresses, especially in companies

Two people accessing the internet via the same infrastructure (eg modem/router/ISP) can 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!

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.