I know other servers are trying to make this change, in which the voter will only be credited with NX if GTOP verifies that a vote has successfully been placed and has counted towards the server's overall totals. So if GTOP doesn't send the notification that a vote has been successfully added to MapleRoyals' count, then the person voting wouldn't receive NX. Obviously you would have to allow people to try to vote again and correctly enter the captcha, so that one mistake didn't lock them out of their voting abilities for the day, but I think this would help because it would encourage people to actually enter the captcha and do it correctly, and it's effect would double in efficacy when comparing our votes to those of other servers, because, since GTOP only counts one vote per IP address per day, this would not only encourage people to vote properly for MapleRoyals, but it would discourage people from voting to obtain NX on other servers, as that would keep them from gaining NX here. They could just vote here first and get NX and then vote for the other server and get NX there, but their vote for the other server wouldn't actually count. Just a thought, and sorry I can tell it's going to be a little bit difficult to read my mind is jumbled.
Except you are getting free nx for not voting for MR...which is supposed to be the entire reason why you are receiving free nx...as a reward for voting for the server.
It is a good idea, but there is one potential flaw with using pingback with gtop100. As they can only pass on the IP of the user voting and send it back to our server, the mysql query will grab the first account it comes across which has that IP address. So if there is more than one account in the database with that IP which is above the row which the account you want the NX to go on - it will go straight onto a different account rather than the one they want it to go onto. However, there could be a way to get round this but would require a bit of work... Requiring an additional table in the database, and another tool added to the user control panel on the main website. Thanks for your input though. It would also largely decrease the amount of vote abusing if we did it this way, and potentially increase the votes per day... As we have found out from Gags.
Haha no problem, just a thought. If it involves too much work then it's not necessary, or can at least be saved for a later time.
A question and a few remarks: Will they respond to the vote with nothing but the IP address? Will there be no time stamp of any description? Not at all. Sort the voting table by descending order of the time column (which, given this, is probably called lastvote). Finally, if the site at hand does respond with some indication of time, it would be even simpler: compute the difference between your recorded vote time and GTOP100's and select the voting record matching the IP that has the smallest time difference.
It seems like only the IP is passed back as shown here: http://www.gtop100.com/pingbackvoting However we can add the timestamp at our end, like we currently do. The problem is that the NX And account information is stored on the accounts table, where the lastknownip of that user is, which is what we would use to decide which account for the NX to go on. Edit: However you do make a semi-valid point. We could apply a timestamp prior to them going to the vote page, and compare it to the timestamp we could implement when their ping back is received. But again this requires a few modifications.
Can GTOP implement pingback where mapleroyals sends a randomly generated ID attached with IP/MAC of the machine doing the vote? Then that ID would be pingbacked and the server would know which account it is connected to?