How We Choose Winners

Ever wonder how winners are picked in online "give away" contests? Most don't tell you how they do it and it makes you wonder, 'Just how fair is this contest anyway?'

Well, here's how we do it.

We searched and searched the internet for a random name picker program and we finally found a freeware program called "The Hat" which we downloaded at Harmony Hollow Software. This little program simply shuffles a list of text values at random.

We take all of the entries, since the last time we drew, and import them into a database. The database is then polled for duplicate records (Folks who entered more than once) and those records are deleted.

We then assign a unique random number to each of the remaining records. The numbers alone are exported to a text file. We use "The Hat" to open the file containing the numbers and shuffle them. Once the program stops, the numbers at the top of the list are our winners.

These "numbers" are then matched with the coinciding records in the database to see the winners names and contact information. (If for some reason we are unable to contact a winner, we will pronounce the next number on the list as the replacement winner.)

Very simple and very fair! Thanks for entering and Good Luck!