Hi. I am going to have a contest on my site that grants a year of hosting to a randomly selected winner. Have any of you done this? I am trying to figure out the best way to do it. I could just have a basic form, and collect their info, but that might end up a pain in the arse. How could i enjoy trying to go through a ton of emails with their info!? Is there some way to have them input their info, then have that written to a text file or something? Perhaps a database?

Any ideas or insight is very very very much appreciated!!

-matt

Tell people to send emails to something like contest@cloud9media.com and write down every email address you get drop them in a hat shake them up and pick the winner.. that would prob be the easiest way I can think of..

Easiest way I could think of would be to create a MySQL table with two fields, an auto_increment ID, and a tinytext email_address. When someone signs up from a form, insert their email address into the table. Then, when you're ready to draw, create a small script that picks a random number from one to whatever the last ID is, and make the winner the email address associated with that ID.

We have a form that the user fills out and their info gets placed into a database. At the end of the contest we have a perl script randomly select five entries based on the total amount of entrants. We then manually verify the information on each selected entrant and if all looks legit we contact them to notify them that they have won and how to redeem the prize.