How best to block multiple "counts" on a counter?

Question

I've got a real cheesy counter, just adds one to the counter field when a visit hits it. It's not counting page hits, but it's still cheesy.

What I need to do is stop someone from just hitting refresh over and over. What's the simplest was to get this done? Cookies?

I'd prefer not to log every visitor's ip address, etc... something simple - in C# asp.net mvc.

Answer 1

Yes, cookies would be a simple way to achieve that. Even simpler would be to simply set a value in Session - if that is set, this visit has been registered, so we should not increment the counter again.

This way you will also count a "visit" per session, which most often is the best measure for unique visits.

Pseudocode to implement:

if (Session["HasCountedThisVisitor"] == null) 
{
    counter++; 
    Session["HasCountedThisVisitor"] = true;
}

Answer 2

Cookie or a session variable that you check if it has been set, before increasing the counter..

Answer 3

If you don't wish to save any extra information into your server, then you need to use something to store data in the client side. I'm not saying its ideal, but yes, using cookies is potentially the simplest way to prevent "visit counter spam".

I suggest the following strategy for a quick-and-dirty counter implementation:

• Use a cookie to mark if a visitor has been already logged ("firstVisit")
• If the cookie has not been defined, add a visitor to your counter and create a cookie

Note that if someone has cookies disabled, you may still get duplicate visits. But hey, I didn't say this is trivial!

Answer 4

Why?

There are tons of free logging tools, some analyze your IIS logs, some give you some javascript to place on your pages. Google Analytics is pretty awesome and free.

You're reinventing the wheel here.