Creating a URL that will randomize at intervals and remove access to past URLs - html

Question

Okay, I know this question has been half answered around here, but I'll explain in full and see if there maybe a better way to handle this then in just two parts.
I'm building an HTML5 voting site, that will close voting every half hour. And then open a new batch of voting.
What I need to do, is have the URL of this site be 'masked' ie:
have a random URL for it be generated that leads to the same location- so say I'm directing users to voting.com, I want them to only access it via the url votingstuff.com/hg67, and have that end portion be changed every half hour- and once the new url is generated, remove access to the site via the old URL.
I might add that after the user votes, I'd also like to close their voting access until the new URL is posted. AKA- everyone only gets one chance to vote.
Thoughts? Libraries to check out? Sites that do this? I know the randomization has been answered a few times, but usually it's a generator led to by a page, I want to START with a randomly generated URL, and not have a page that creates it as a function. I may have to write code that generates the page I guess?

Answer 1

Here is an approach I can think of -
You don't need to handle multiple URL's, you can achieve this on the same URL itself by enabling/disabling access to the URL content every hour.
You will need some action on your application/server side as well. For reference lets assume you have a PHP server running. You will need some table that holds a status setting for you, something like this -
Settings Table
id settingCode value
=============================
1 votingOpen 1
You will also need to setup a cron job on your server that will run every half an hour. The cron job's task would be to run every half an hour & change the value of the votingOpen to its inverse. So assume open your votings, initial value of the votingOpen field would be 1 i.e the first half an hour of voting starts.
Along with this you will start the cron job as well. Now what will happen is that after half an hour the cron job will fetch the value of votingOpen read it & if its 1, it will change it to 0 & if its 0 it will change it to 1. This will happen every half an hour on your server.
Now you need to make this votingOpen variable accessible on your client side code using a simple query to fetch its value. On each render of your voting page, on top somewhere you can check this value & if its 1 i.e true, you will write the logic to go ahead & show the voting page. But if its 0, you can redirect the user or show a different message on that page.
Lets say your voting happens on http://somedomain.com/voting, on the render logic of this page you can do something like this -
Voting View Logic
<?php
$votingOpen = {some database query that fetches the value from the database};
if($votingOpen) {
// your voting view resides here
} else {
// either redirect user to some other page
// or show some message like voting is closed on this same page.
}
?>
Limit multiple votes from one person
Normally the best way to handle this is a combination or registered user only vote + cookie/localStorage + IP tracking
But if you don't have registered user voting, you can still capture IP of user & allow only one vote per IP and you can also set a cookie or a localStorage variable in the users computer so he can only vote once.
Hope this helps.
Ref for Cron Job - http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/managing-cron-jobs-with-php--net-19428