Competitions for XenForo [Deleted]

Couple of things. First, we get our sponsors to post out the prizes. We pass along the winners' email address and leave it to them to organise everything from there. We don't have the time.
Second, although we haven't launched yet, so have never run limited competitions, the point to consider for sponsors is that by restricting the entry to more active members, we are targeting the competition to people who are more likely to take a specific interest in the sponsors' product and/or services.
 
Stuart Wright said:
Couple of things. First, we get our sponsors to post out the prizes. We pass along the winners' email address and leave it to them to organise everything from there. We don't have the time.
Second, although we haven't launched yet, so have never run limited competitions, the point to consider for sponsors is that by restricting the entry to more active members, we are targeting the competition to people who are more likely to take a specific interest in the sponsors' product and/or services.
Click to expand...

I can see your point there. Plus the more active users are more likely to post a review about the product or service. That offers more value to them. I wasn't looking at it from that point of view.

James
 
With the new season of The Walking Dead starting tonight I finally made it a point to dedicate a few minutes to getting this up & running at AWBM. :)

http://awalkerbit.me/competitions/

Have a few questions/items for Chris & Stuart.... :D
  • When assigning a value to the prize the description is "For reporting purposes, please enter the prize value. Numbers only. £ GBP is assumed." I may have missed it but what reports?
  • I like that that thumbnails allow any image to uploaded & cropped instead of having create & upload a specific sized image.
  • The description for the ""Opt-in marketing message:" value is "To activate the Opt-in/Opt-out tickbox, enter a marketing message here. It must clearly inform people what exactly they are signing up to. If the competition sponsors violate our privacy policy or we receive any complaints of spam, then Stuart will likely refuse to deal with the company in question again in either competitions or advertising." Sorry, no, I don't think Stuart will be making any decisions regarding any competitions on my sites. :P ;) A more generic wording would be better.
  • I have no default thread user name entered (the default out-of-the-box behavior). While creating a competition it does not seem to save the "Create Thread By" value. If I create a new published competition but it is not open and specify the value then when I go back into the competition to make any changes the value for "Create Thread By" is empty.
  • Could the display of the "Hint" and "Message above Enter Button" text be further differentiated other than just font size? With the hint being displayed immediately below the last selection item it is not immediately clear that it is not part of the last selection item and when the message above the enter button is displayed along with a hint it looks a bit run-on.
  • For our first public competition I set that three winners will be drawn. I assume that this means that amongst the entrants then it will select three people who have chosen the correct answer. With that in mind, what does the ""Number of Runners up" selection do?
 
Kevin said:
When assigning a value to the prize the description is "For reporting purposes, please enter the prize value. Numbers only. £ GBP is assumed." I may have missed it but what reports?
Click to expand...
At some point in the future, we can create reports on the value of prizes given away in our competitions. Useful from a business perspective and to tell potential sponsors.
Kevin said:
  • The description for the ""Opt-in marketing message:" value is "To activate the Opt-in/Opt-out tickbox, enter a marketing message here. It must clearly inform people what exactly they are signing up to. If the competition sponsors violate our privacy policy or we receive any complaints of spam, then Stuart will likely refuse to deal with the company in question again in either competitions or advertising." Sorry, no, I don't think Stuart will be making any decisions regarding any competitions on my sites. :p ;) A more generic wording would be better.
Click to expand...
Yep :) But you get the idea.
Kevin said:
  • For our first public competition I set that three winners will be drawn. I assume that this means that amongst the entrants then it will select three people who have chosen the correct answer. With that in mind, what does the ""Number of Runners up" selection do?
Click to expand...
Sometimes there is a main winner who gets the 'star prize' and several runners up who get a smaller prize.
A sponsor might, for example, have a Blu-ray player and half a dozen Blu-ray discs to give away.
So you might have a main winner who gets the player and a disc and then 5 runners up who each get a disc.
They are all just different types of winner, but the system picks the main winner and the runners up for you.
It picks them all randomly.

If you want to have 3 winners and no runners up, that's fine.
You have to have at least 1 main winner, but otherwise you can have any number of winners and runners up.
 
This is probably "pie in the sky stuff" but what I'd really like is the ability to set some rules (within the addon itself) which unlocks the competition to a user once a posting/content criteria is met (like make a review and then enter the comp). Currently, I'm using user groups to manually manage incentive by offering Premium Membership (and thus the ability to enter comps) to those who make a review but my forum is small - one day my forum will be too big to manage it this way... hopefully ;) I'm no developer but I imagine it would be difficult to integrate otherwise it would have been done already. Never hurts to plant a seed.
 
Any known problems with the scheduled close time? I just had a little issue where the competition I created today, 2013-10-13, that was open & published with an end date of 2013-10-14 closed tonight, 2013-10-13, around 8:30PM'ish. My understanding of the ending date description is that it should have closed near the evening of 2013-10-14 near midnight (11:59PM the night of 2013-10-14).

Since it ended early I tried going back and pushing out the end date several days. It allowed me to do that but did not re-open the competition; it looks like there is no way of reopening a closed competition through the GUI. I ended up manually changing the "competition_state" in xf_avforums_competitions and the "entry_state" values in xf_avorums_competisions_entry table. Anything else to get it reset back to a fully open state?

Stuart Wright said:
At some point in the future, we can create reports on the value of prizes given away in our competitions. Useful from a business perspective and to tell potential sponsors.
Click to expand...
Useful indeed and will be welcome in a future update. From the wording I just wasn't sure if I missed a feature somewhere.
Stuart Wright said:
Yep :) But you get the idea.
Click to expand...
I understood the intent but if I had it open for other people besides admin's to create competitions then their first question is likely going to be "Who's Stuart?".

Stuart Wright said:
Sometimes there is a main winner who gets the 'star prize' and several runners up who get a smaller prize. A sponsor might, for example, have a Blu-ray player and half a dozen Blu-ray discs to give away. So you might have a main winner who gets the player and a disc and then 5 runners up who each get a disc. They are all just different types of winner, but the system picks the main winner and the runners up for you. It picks them all randomly.
Click to expand...
I understand the concept of having runner-ups but I must've missed in the feature descriptions that it supported automatic selections of runner ups also. Nice feature, will come in handy for some bigger prize value competitions.
 
Does the "new competition" alert stay until you've entered a competition? I was expecting it to stay until you viewed a competition, regardless of if you entered it or not.

We have a few people complaining that they can't get rid of the alert :rolleyes:
 
The count is the number of competitions which have not yet been entered. Nothing to do with viewing them.

It can be globally turned off in the Options.

My point of view is: Just enter the competition! You might win!
 
Chris Deeming said:
The count is the number of competitions which have not yet been entered. Nothing to do with viewing them.

It can be globally turned off in the Options.

My point of view is: Just enter the competition! You might win!
Click to expand...

I agree that they should just enter, but would it still show if they are not able to enter because of restrictions?

James
 
Flexin said:
I agree that they should just enter, but would it still show if they are not able to enter because of restrictions?

James
Click to expand...
Hmm. Good question. Yes. Because to help performance it is actually cached at save time. If the count was dynamically calculated based on what you can/can't enter there would be some performance overhead there.
 
Kevin said:
  • The description for the ""Opt-in marketing message:" value is "To activate the Opt-in/Opt-out tickbox, enter a marketing message here. It must clearly inform people what exactly they are signing up to. If the competition sponsors violate our privacy policy or we receive any complaints of spam, then Stuart will likely refuse to deal with the company in question again in either competitions or advertising." Sorry, no, I don't think Stuart will be making any decisions regarding any competitions on my sites. :p ;) A more generic wording would be better.
  • I have no default thread user name entered (the default out-of-the-box behavior). While creating a competition it does not seem to save the "Create Thread By" value. If I create a new published competition but it is not open and specify the value then when I go back into the competition to make any changes the value for "Create Thread By" is empty.
  • Could the display of the "Hint" and "Message above Enter Button" text be further differentiated other than just font size? With the hint being displayed immediately below the last selection item it is not immediately clear that it is not part of the last selection item and when the message above the enter button is displayed along with a hint it looks a bit run-on.
Click to expand...
Kevin said:
Any known problems with the scheduled close time? I just had a little issue where the competition I created today, 2013-10-13, that was open & published with an end date of 2013-10-14 closed tonight, 2013-10-13, around 8:30PM'ish. My understanding of the ending date description is that it should have closed near the evening of 2013-10-14 near midnight (11:59PM the night of 2013-10-14).

Since it ended early I tried going back and pushing out the end date several days. It allowed me to do that but did not re-open the competition; it looks like there is no way of reopening a closed competition through the GUI. I ended up manually changing the "competition_state" in xf_avforums_competitions and the "entry_state" values in xf_avorums_competisions_entry table. Anything else to get it reset back to a fully open state?
Click to expand...
One more item... :)

When viewing the Competitions Archive page, can the Start & End Dates be displayed using the month abbreviation, perhaps XXX DD YYYY, instead of DD/MM/YYYY? If not, perhaps using the international date format of YYYY-MM-DD?
 
Chris Deeming said:
Hmm. Good question. Yes. Because to help performance it is actually cached at save time. If the count was dynamically calculated based on what you can/can't enter there would be some performance overhead there.
Click to expand...

To keep the speed by leaving it cached is it possible to have a "no thanks" button for a member that doesn't want to enter that competition? My first prize is being offered by a company. The product is a rust proof type of paint. There are some people that would have no interest in winning it at all. Some might want it to resell. Others might really want to use the product. It would be nice if the ones that didn't want to enter, didn't win it just to shut off the alert.

James
 
Flexin said:
To keep the speed by leaving it cached is it possible to have a "no thanks" button for a member that doesn't want to enter that competition? My first prize is being offered by a company. The product is a rust proof type of paint. There are some people that would have no interest in winning it at all. Some might want it to resell. Others might really want to use the product. It would be nice if the ones that didn't want to enter, didn't win it just to shut off the alert.

James
Click to expand...
I already suggested this. Let's hope it will be implemented one day. And by clicking the No, thanks button you will also get rid of that alert...
 
Hi @Chris Deeming after I installed the addon started to get this error below (upon new registration)

Code: 
Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli_Exception: Mysqli statement execute error : Field 'competition_entries' doesn't have a default value - library/Zend/Db/Statement/Mysqli.php:214
Generated By: Unknown Account, Yesterday at 11:26 PM

#0 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Statement.php(297): Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli->_execute(Array)
#1 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(479): Zend_Db_Statement->execute(Array)
#2 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(574): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->query('INSERT INTO `xf...', Array)
#3 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1612): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->insert('xf_user', Array)
#4 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1601): XenForo_DataWriter->_insert()
#5 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1393): XenForo_DataWriter->_save()
#6 /home/user/public_html/library/MetaMirror/DataWriter/User.php(8): XenForo_DataWriter->save()
#7 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/ControllerPublic/Register.php(294): MetaMirror_DataWriter_User->save()
#8 /home/user/public_html/library/EWRutiles/ControllerPublic/Register.php(116): XenForo_ControllerPublic_Register->actionRegister()
#9 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(337): EWRutiles_ControllerPublic_Register->actionRegister()
#10 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(134): XenForo_FrontController->dispatch(Object(XenForo_RouteMatch))
#11 /home/user/public_html/index.php(13): XenForo_FrontController->run()
#12 {main}

array(3) {
  ["url"] => string(39) "http://www.siteadress.net/register/register"
  ["_GET"] => array(0) {
  }
  ["_POST"] => array(15) {
    ["username"] => string(7) "KAYAZER"
    ["email"] => string(18) "mail@yahoo.com"
    ["password"] => string(8) "********"
    ["password_confirm"] => string(8) "********"
    ["dob_month"] => string(1) "4"
    ["dob_day"] => string(1) "1"
    ["dob_year"] => string(4) "1975"
    ["gender"] => string(0) ""
    ["timezone"] => string(13) "Europe/Athens"
    ["captcha_question_answer"] => string(1) "4"
    ["captcha_question_hash"] => string(40) "dbf26610465c01e3a56936754f25078b34132f37"
    ["agree"] => string(1) "1"
    ["_xfToken"] => string(8) "********"
    ["reg_key"] => string(32) "fd8928f5493eb2c5401b97728f08187f"
    ["site_time"] => string(10) "1381958751"
  }
}
 
yavuz said:
Hi @Chris Deeming after I installed the addon started to get this error below (upon new registration)

Code: 
Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli_Exception: Mysqli statement execute error : Field 'competition_entries' doesn't have a default value - library/Zend/Db/Statement/Mysqli.php:214
Generated By: Unknown Account, Yesterday at 11:26 PM

#0 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Statement.php(297): Zend_Db_Statement_Mysqli->_execute(Array)
#1 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(479): Zend_Db_Statement->execute(Array)
#2 /home/user/public_html/library/Zend/Db/Adapter/Abstract.php(574): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->query('INSERT INTO `xf...', Array)
#3 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1612): Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract->insert('xf_user', Array)
#4 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1601): XenForo_DataWriter->_insert()
#5 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/DataWriter.php(1393): XenForo_DataWriter->_save()
#6 /home/user/public_html/library/MetaMirror/DataWriter/User.php(8): XenForo_DataWriter->save()
#7 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/ControllerPublic/Register.php(294): MetaMirror_DataWriter_User->save()
#8 /home/user/public_html/library/EWRutiles/ControllerPublic/Register.php(116): XenForo_ControllerPublic_Register->actionRegister()
#9 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(337): EWRutiles_ControllerPublic_Register->actionRegister()
#10 /home/user/public_html/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(134): XenForo_FrontController->dispatch(Object(XenForo_RouteMatch))
#11 /home/user/public_html/index.php(13): XenForo_FrontController->run()
#12 {main}

array(3) {
  ["url"] => string(39) "http://www.siteadress.net/register/register"
  ["_GET"] => array(0) {
  }
  ["_POST"] => array(15) {
    ["username"] => string(7) "KAYAZER"
    ["email"] => string(18) "mail@yahoo.com"
    ["password"] => string(8) "********"
    ["password_confirm"] => string(8) "********"
    ["dob_month"] => string(1) "4"
    ["dob_day"] => string(1) "1"
    ["dob_year"] => string(4) "1975"
    ["gender"] => string(0) ""
    ["timezone"] => string(13) "Europe/Athens"
    ["captcha_question_answer"] => string(1) "4"
    ["captcha_question_hash"] => string(40) "dbf26610465c01e3a56936754f25078b34132f37"
    ["agree"] => string(1) "1"
    ["_xfToken"] => string(8) "********"
    ["reg_key"] => string(32) "fd8928f5493eb2c5401b97728f08187f"
    ["site_time"] => string(10) "1381958751"
  }
}
Click to expand...
yavuz, could you try running this query please and let me know if it resolves the issue?

Code: 
ALTER TABLE `xf_user` CHANGE COLUMN `competition_entries` `competition_entries` BLOB NULL DEFAULT NULL
 
Chris Deeming said:
yavuz, could you try running this query please and let me know if it resolves the issue?

Code: 
ALTER TABLE `xf_user` CHANGE COLUMN `competition_entries` `competition_entries` BLOB NULL DEFAULT NULL
Click to expand...

Sorry but I had to unistall the addon Chris. I'll run it first chance I get.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Jean-Baptiste
🔥[Foro.agency] Trello BBCode (integrate a Trello board) - Kanban for XenForo [Deleted]
Replies
9
Views
2K
Jean-Baptiste
Jean-Baptiste
ThemeHouse
XPress - A theme and bridge for bringing WordPress into XenForo [Deleted]
89 90 91
Replies
2K
Views
157K
Dad.
D
E
Competitions for XenForo - Translate German ?
Replies
4
Views
2K
El-Tiburon
E
Puntocom
nginx + ssl configuration for XenForo [Deleted]
Replies
1
Views
1K
Puntocom
Puntocom
Adam Howard
MaxCDN for XenForo [Deleted]
2 3
Replies
42
Views
7K
Adam Howard
Adam Howard
Top Bottom