Client wants to have a weekly drawing

Does anyone have suggestions on ways to do this?

[scribble]

A client of ours wants to hold a weekly trivia contest in which a winner will be selected at random and given a prize.

How I see this working is the visitor to the site will fill out a form, answer the trivia question and submit the results to our client who will then keep track of each entry and somehow pick a winner at random.

Can anyone suggest a better, more automated way of doing something like this?

Would appreciate the advice of anyone who's done something similar.

Thank you.

[Peb0]

I would say that most of the complexity comes from determining if a persons response is correct or not.

If it's a simple multiple choice then no issues but if it's a 'long answer' or some other interpreted response then your method is pretty much the only way.

Once you can determine if an answer is correct, automating the draw and issuance of said notification or prizes is simple.

[JasonHamilton]

If I was developing this project, I'd have the questions be submitted by a form, which go into a database. Each week at a given time I'd randomly choose a winner (can be based on any number of variables, from all correct answers, down to the fastest submit time) and have the system send the project manager the winner's info, plus stats about the contest (how many filled out the form, how many got the questions right, etc).

Manually keeping track of the submitted forms would be a nightmare, especially if things took off.

This project would be about a "1", on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being hardest.

[scribble]

Peb0, it is a multiple choice format.

JasonHamilton, thank you for your informative response. Are you a programmer by any chance?

[JasonHamilton]

I am. I do stuff like this all the time :)

[Peb0]

Ya,
I assumed that you would be storing submissions in a DB. Am I correct that the primary purpose is to collect contact information?

I agree with JasonHamilton, it would be pretty simple. You could complicate the winning qualifications as much as you like by developing a "rating" system or whatever.

You could even have it auto-mail the winner but it would probably be simpler just to supply your manager with a summary of all submissions along with the selected winner and have him do a personal response.

You could queue up multiple contests and just set start and end dates. Then have the website deliver the "current" contest dynamically. This way you could set up a maintenance program that would let you append new contests once a month (or whenever).