In a website with no users, are cookies the only way to prevent people from repeating actions?

Question

I'm creating a website and I don't want to have user/membership.

However, people using the site can do things like vote and flag questionable content. Is the only way to identify and prevent users from doing this repeatedly by using cookies?

I realize a user can just clear their cookies but I can't think of another way.

Suggestions for this scenario?

Answer 1

Well you could map a cookie + ip-adress in a datarecord in your database. To identify the user. So if the ip exists in the database, you simply just add the cookie, but check the cookie first to avoid unessesary database calls.

This is not optimal though, since schools etc might have the same ips on a lot of computers.

You can always just adapt openid!