Preventing simultaneous logins (was Users voting)

Rails
1

In the user voting topic some people brought up that if you use an IP
address to track or attach behavior you could be blocking users using
Proxy servers specifically AOL users. I was planning on tracking IP
addresses to see when a user tried to login twice from different
machines. What else could I do to prevent a user logging in from two
different locations simultaneously?

I want to prevent users sharing logins while using my service. It’s
pretty important to be able to block this.

Charlie

2

Charlie H. wrote:

In the user voting topic some people brought up that if you use an IP
address to track or attach behavior you could be blocking users using
Proxy servers specifically AOL users. I was planning on tracking IP
addresses to see when a user tried to login twice from different
machines. What else could I do to prevent a user logging in from two
different locations simultaneously?

I want to prevent users sharing logins while using my service. It’s
pretty important to be able to block this.

Charlie

I’ve achieved the same thing by using the session table with a user_id.

When the user logs in, I look for and delete any other sessions with
that user id. Then I attach the user id to the current session record.

Each time a user tries to access a page I check that their session still
exists. If its been deleted I give them a message telling them that
they have logged in elsewhere and that this session has been terminated.

–john
http://www.webtestlive.com

3

So I assume you’re storing your session objects into the database
instead of the file system?

I’ve achieved the same thing by using the session table with a user_id.

When the user logs in, I look for and delete any other sessions with
that user id. Then I attach the user id to the current session record.

Each time a user tries to access a page I check that their session still
exists. If its been deleted I give them a message telling them that
they have logged in elsewhere and that this session has been terminated.

–john
http://www.webtestlive.com

4

isn’t that the normal way of doing it!?