How to get ip of current users who visit a particular article

Question

I have table called blog with the fields id, count, headline, text and i want to to get the n most read posts, but when a user reads an article, that is counted only once.How can this be solved using the IP address?

Answer 1

You can use the superglobal variable $_SERVER, the field remote_addr contain the user IP but it isn't a secure way to count them. An other way is to count the number of user session, using the variable $_SESSION.

Answer 2

Refer to this thread on getting IP - How to get the client IP address in PHP?

You can add another table to your DB, let's say hits with post_id (foreign key to your blog table) and ip_address as columns.

You can follow this logic afterwards.

1. Get client IP ($ip) and current post ID ($pid)
2. Query hits table with condition - WHERE ip_address = $ip AND post_id = $pid
3. IF a row is returned that means article has been viewed from this IP so do nothing ELSE insert the row in table with $ip and $pid

If you need to count hits for a article, you can do a count query with post_id in where clause.