Riddle’s quiz maker is super flexible – and makes it easy to engage your audience with 15 types of polls and quizzes. Now our enhanced security gives you more control over who takes your riddles – so you can protect your audience’s responses.

enhanced security overview

First off – let’s get real.

Online polls and quizzes are brilliant at asking your audience to interact with your site.

However, mischievous coders sometimes like to hack polls to skew the results.

Riddle now has enhanced security – to make this much, much more difficult.

(We’d like to say impossible – but the fact is any online tool is susceptible to being hacked. However, Riddle is now the most secure quiz maker we’ve seen – and we’ll keep getting better.)

Video – enhanced security with Riddle

Enhanced security – the settings

We launched this in October, 2020 for our opinion poll and multi-poll Riddle types. But we’ll be extending to cover all our formats very shortly.

Right, now go to our ‘Customize’ step – and select the ‘Security’ section.

Per browser options

  • Limit voting once per browser session – by default this is on. This enhanced security option limits each user from voting once per browser (ie. 1x by Safari, 1x by Chrome, etc.). Turned off – your polls are in ‘unlimited’ mode, and users can vote as many times as they like.
  • Vote again button – if you have ‘unlimited’ on, your users can immediately click this to vote again. Great for pure engagement – for passionate fans who want to vote and vote and vote (which means lots more time on your site).
enhanced security options

Limit by IP option

  • Enhanced security – next up, we have our ‘limit by IP’ feature. It’s a bit geeky – but it lets you limit how many votes come from a single IP address.
    • This is designed to prevent one hacker from sending thousands or millions of votes from their computer.
    • Please note: this does not limit how many times a quiz or poll can be taken.
    • We simply won’t store any data from extra votes or quiz takes – so your results won’t be affected.
  • Time period – You can set the time frame… by minute, hour, or day.
  • Units – choose how many votes per time period (e.g. 10). Here are example use cases:
    • Strict: You could limit votes to, say, 5 per hour.
    • Less strict: You could place a limit of 100 votes per day – ideal if your audience might be in office buildings, with dozens of people using the same IP address.
enhanced security - limit by IP addresses

Enhanced security – data protection details

We never store the actual IP addresses of your poll takers on our servers. (Riddle is an EU-based, GDPR-compliant quiz maker – so we don’t store personal information like this.)

enhanced security gdpr compliant

We hash the IP with md5 encryption and only store the hash in our cache, where it gets deleted after 24 hours max.

If you are unfamiliar with hashing, here is the non-techie explanation:

  • When a user votes we get the IP address and encrypt it with a secret key.
  • The way this key works is that the same IP address always generates the same encrypted string, allowing us to limit voting by IP address.
  • However, the encryption key only works like a one way street. It can be used to encrypt something, but there is no way to decrypt the encrypted string to get the IP address out of an encrypted string.
  • In a nutshell, there is no way to look up the actual IP addresses that were used.

Does not work with our webhook

Please note – this enhanced security feature does not currently apply if you’re using our webhook. All submissions will go directly through to your database.

Any questions about our enhanced security features?

Our whole team, including our cofounders Boris and Mike, love helping our customers via support chats.

Enhanced security for polls and quizzes is a good example why – this feature came about from customer requests.

And that’s not all.

We had initially planned only to add this to polls. But after hearing from our community, we’ll be adding it soon to quizzes and all our formats.

Leave a Comment