limit log ins by Machine ID

What is a machine ID?

@sterndata https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-find-my-computers-machine-id

@sterndata A unique code, often machine-generated, that uniquely represents a given physical device or machine.

That’s irrelevant for web servers. You could record my IP address, however, all computers and devices in my house will show the same IP. But when I take my phone outside and it switches to the cellular network, you’ll see a different IP, and that IP may change again as I wander near a starbucks and hop onto their WiFi.

You might consider using cookies as they’d be associated with a particular browser. On a login, get/set a cookie with some associated ID. If there are already X cookies recorded for that user (and you’d need to figure out how to store this), then tell them they can’t login or need to upgrade their membership. If not, add the cookie and increment the count. However, you need to deal with folks who clear cookies, GDPR stuff, etc.

You also might ask the developer of this plugin whether they have any ideas: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/only-one-device-login-limit Look at this plugin, too: https://wpactivitylog.com/support/kb/managing-multiple-same-wordpress-user-sessions/

Thanks @sterndata but are you sure there is no way to see the individual computer’s machine ID?

ID, not local IP

The ID in the article you posted is the host name. That’s not provided to the server by a web browser. At best, you could get a user agent string… my current one is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36 and there’s not much you can do with that.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).