How can I make remember voting with cookies easier than this?

Question

It is the most easiest to describe my problem with a working example: even if you are not logged in, YouTube remembers what you have watched, and next time gives you suggestions based on previous watched movies.

My site is similar in a way: the users can vote on articles without logging in, and the site remembers votes with cookies. I have figured out a working method, but there has to be an easier way - also now the DB usage is anything but optimized.

For every visitor there is a check if he has the cookies. If yes I query his votes. If not I create a dummy user, and send him out the cookies. Now I store this users "last_visit" timestamp. After this everything is the same for both users. My problem is that my DB is filling up with dummy users, so I made my cookies expire in 3 months and my site regularly check which users didn't visit my site in the last 3 months, and deletes them from the DB.

I know I overcomplicated this, but my vote system is using AJAX, and I couldn't find a method to send out a cookie (and create the dummy user) only if a vote happens and not every time a simple visitor browses my site - without vote.

Also a note: I insist on using cookies - I know it would be easier to store IP-s when a vote happens, but there are schools, businesses using the same IP, and I like to allow their users to use my site.

What did I miss here? How can this be optimized?

Answer 1

if they do not hold a permanent account, why store anything related to them in the database at all? just record their prior votes in the cookie. you would also store averall votes in the db, but anonymously, and not relate these to "users" at all.