General Discussion

Suggestion for Contest Pages:

On Each and every contest page (o on the contest list page) there should be the following statistics:

1. A Login Counter for the current user from since they first entered the contest.
2. An Entries Counter for the current user. (Divide login count number by 5 to get current number of entries. Truncate the Decimals [DONT ROUND]. If greater than 5, set current entries to 5.) 
3. Days Left In Contest

The following were said to be too much:

1. Total Number of Contestants. (based on a counter that increments each time someone enters the contest.)
2. And possibly, Total Number of Entries from all users
3. And possibly, Odds of winning at least one of the prizes. (based on total number of Entries from all users and the number from the Entries Counter)

Overall this will keep us updated on our chances of winning and allows us to see if our logins are actually being counted...I have doubts some times.

Do we have to log off and log in for our login to be tallied...or do we just have to load at least one page a day?

This would all be easy to do except for "total entries in contest" and  "odds of winning" as this would require our system to calc all the logins for all the users in the contest - because we only count one login per day it ends up taxing our db server to extract just this data - especially each time a user visits the contest page.  For example, when we actually draw the winners with a contest with 20,000 users it takes the system about 45 secs to compute it...

I will look into though and see what kind of stats we can get in there.

Thanks for your feedback!

Heh, unfortunatly enhancements like this don't turn around quite that fast.  We are busy churning things out all ready and this addition is definatly on the list, but since it's not a show-stopper and a pretty specialized addition (see admin post above) it's not going to show up overnight.

I understand now.

Here is a slight variation on the idea. Instead of posting the stats on each contest page...how about on the contest list page you have a summary section showing the stats for each contest the user is enrolled in. It would probably be easier than inserting the code on each contest page....less redundancy.