Pick Giveaway Winner Plugin
Randomly select a winner or winners from the comments of a giveaway post.
This plugin randomly selects a winner or winners from the comments of a giveaway post. It only lists the 100 most recent posts to reduce strain on your server. You can disqualify people who’ve entered more than once (determined by email), or reduce their entries to only one. The plugin uses MySQL’s random function RAND() to randomly select the winners directly from the database.
Installation
- Upload the folder ‘pick-giveaway-winner’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- Go to Tools -> Pick Giveaway Winner.
- Select the giveaway post from the drop-down menu.
- Select how many winners you want.
- Choose how to handle duplicate entries (determined by email).
- Press the “Pick Winner!” button to randomly draw your winners.
Screenshots
This is how the winner selection screen looks right after you've chosen a winner or winners.
FAQ
The plugin uses MySQL’s RAND() function to pick the winners directly from the database.
The more comments your post has, the longer it will take to parse the data and determine a winner. Also, if you choose to “Discard multiple entries, but allow the entrant a single entry” the plugin has to do an additional database query to get your results, which takes more time. Be patient and your results will be returned as soon as possible.
It may seem counterintuitive, but if you re-run the plugin on the same post and occasionally get the same winner, this proves that the plugin actually is random. For example, if you roll a dice several times you will eventually get the same number twice in a row. The same thing happens with the plugin. However, if you run the plugin several times in a row and keep getting the same winner, that could indicate a problem.
This is done to reduce strain on the server and avoid problems that occurred when people had more than a thousand posts. Most giveaways should be done by the time you’ve posted 100 more posts, so this shouldn’t cause problems for most people.
Sure! Go to my plugin page at https://www.makeworthymedia.com/plugins/ to donate.
Yes, I would! Thanks to Roni Noone at http://www.roninoone.com/ for beta testing this plugin.
Changelog
1.3
- Changed the way the dropdown list of posts is generated and limited it to the most recent 100 posts to avoid trouble people were having if they had more than a thousand posts.
1.1
- Removed wpdb::prepare() errors you might see when running the plugin in WordPress 3.5 and up.
- Added label tags to radio button options so you can select an option by clicking on the text next to it and not just directly on the radio button.
- Updated the FAQ to answer a frequent question about the randomness of the plugin.
1.0
- Original version of the plugin.