PHP View Counter Spam Prevention - php

Question

Hey, I already have a view counter coded, but i need help preventing people from just refreshing and refreshing to add more views. Normally, i Would mark this storing the ip, page name and date viewed in a SQL table where in php, i would run a search to see if someone with that ip has viewed the page within 24 hours, but I run a website that is mostly operated in schools and i want each computer in a computer lab to count as a view when they see the page. Again, i could use cookies but my server isn't sending out cookies right. It works fine on my testserver but not on the dedicated web hosting server. Is there any other way to prevent spam?
Heres my code
function connect() {
$domain = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$dbhost = 'censored';
$dbname = 'censored';
$dbuser = 'censored';
$dbpass ='censored';
if ($domain == 'localhost'){
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbname = 'db1';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass ='';
}
$con = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
if(!$con){
trigger_error("Problem Connecting to the MySQL Server.");
}
$db = mysql_select_db($dbname, $con);
if(!$db){
trigger_error("Problem finding the Database!");
}
return $con;
}
function fetchdata($qry){
connect();
$result = mysql_query($qry);
return $fetch = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
}
function addcounter($id) {
connect();
$counter = fetchdata("SELECT * FROM counter WHERE `path` = '$id';");
$counter = $counter['counter'];
if(isset($_COOKIE["counter_".$id.""])){
}else{
if ($counter === NULL) {
mysql_query("INSERT INTO counter VALUES (0, '" .$id. "');");
}
echo "<!-- submitting query -->";
mysql_query("UPDATE counter SET counter = `counter`+ 1 WHERE path = ".$id."") or die ('failupdate');
setcookie("counter_$id", "Playcookie_".$id."");
}
}

Answer 1

If you cannot use the user's IP address (presumably because they are behind NAT?) and you cannot use cookies, there's really not much you can do.
You could try to use the IP together with the user agent string (which might be different among different computers in the lab), but this would be both slower and of course far from guaranteed to work.
Other than that I think you 're out of options.