Originally Posted by Wildhoney

To be honest with you, I think this is badly designed. The 2,000 limit is all fine and dandy, but there are better ways to protect against click-bots. I set one up last night, hence why Europe got 2,000 votes in a short space of time. There's no way you should just leave the clicking down to a simple URL argument.

Talking of URL arguments, by the way, there's a buggeth right here if you set the continent argument as an array.

As for the bad programming design, how about something where you set an hidden attribute on the page and then check it matches once they submitted, that way although the click-bots will still be able to work, they'd be much more difficult to create and thus may deter people from doing so. Surely 2,000 clicks from a click-bot is bad enough? And whilst we're at it, keeping track of a user by their IP is a bad, bad move. If I was on AOL, or if I had the time to run my script through alternating proxy servers, I could get Europe to the moon within half an hour. One giant leap for mankind!

You may wish to have a read of my article on TalkPHP.com, and also the comments, as there's some interesting discussions pertaining to what you're doing here.

Though it's a fun game nonetheless.