«

»

Oct 17

Picking Winners with Punchtab vs. Rafflecopter

Categories:

Blogging

by Justin Germino

You know, Punchtab does a much better job of validating the entries than Rafflecopter for contests and it doesn’t do a bad job randomly picking a winner but it does lack compared to Rafflecopter in remembering who you choose and it does not offer the ability to announce the winner(s) in the contest widget like Rafflecopter does.

Choosing a Winner in Punchtab

image

When you pick a Winner in punchtab, it randomly scrolls down and selects the winning entry and spawns a window for you to instantly send an email to notify the winner that they won.  This is fine and works well, but it doesn’t remember who you previously chose.

Once you have to select a 2nd winner, it keeps no track of the previous winners it would appear.  This makes it hard to know who it selected previously until you receive the email copy to the winner so you remember who was selected.

This is a pretty annoying limitation of the Punchtab contest system and the most lacking feature I have encountered so far.  It should highlight, flag or display the winners with a separate column so you can track the winner.  It should have the ability to publish the winner names in the widget like Rafflecopter can once they confirm, you should be able to click an announce button like Rafflecopter.

Rafflecopter Handles the Winning Entry and Announcement process better than Punchtab in contests and a contest is about selecting the winner.  This doesn’t affect the contestants who won, but it really makes it more of a pain for the one hosting a contest with multiple winners. Need to open an enhancement request with Punchtab to get this added soon.

Meanwhile, I still like both systems and a hybrid of the 2 systems would be perfect.  Rafflecopter does some things better for contests and Punchtab does other things better, but both of them have different disadvantages and lacking features so that once you start using both you wish one of them would implement the features the other has but that one lacks.

-Justin Germino

Justin Germino

Justin Germino

Owner
IT Security Expert who is a married father of two children living in Arizona, my hobbies include technology, blogging and spending quality time with my family.
Justin Germino

@dragonblogger

Justin Germino
Justin Germino

Latest posts by Justin Germino (see all)

Blue Host Web Hosting

Tags: , ,

  • http://www.metallman.com MetallmanX

    Hey there Justin. I find the lack of notification on the widget annoying. I like to post that a winner has been selected and I can’t do that with the PunchTab widget. It merely states to check your Email to see if you’ve won. I really hope it’s something that they will look into and fix, especially since they won’t track the winners for you.

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Well, at least it lets you instantly email the winner but yeah, this is why I announce it on my Fanpage and will start editing the blog post to announce manually for future Punchtab contests.
      I agree, it should display the winner in the @Punchtab widget a separate ‘announce’ when they have confirmed like Rafflecopter would be easy to implement and well worth it.

      • http://www.metallman.com MetallmanX

        I’m still trying to decide how I would announce the winner. I thought that maybe a print screen of the winner once chosen by PunchTab but I’m not too fond of that idea. I think I’ll annnounce on the fan page as well and then go from there. That’s probably the only thing that really irks me about PunchTab.

        • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

          I agree, maybe they will fix it. They have a system where you open feature requests and have them voted, maybe we should poll people and starting having mass votes help influence features.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003899663887 Nikki Ray

    Thank you for the comparison between PunchTab and RaffleCopter. Great article! :)

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      Glad you enjoyed it, as you can tell I like features of both systems and they both have some overlap of features but Rafflecopter does pick the winner and announce better than Punchtab which is something they need to enhance.

  • deaddogdesign

    Thanks for this information. I am running my first comp so reading everything on contest. I used PunchTab. I might have to try Rafflecopter next and see which I like better.

    • http://www.dragonblogger.com Justin Germino

      The winner announcement is nicer on Rafflecopter as is some of the custom entries, but boy if you get thousands of entries you will find it difficult to manually validate them. There can be more “fake” entries in Rafflecopter due to it’s lack of automated validation of likes, tweets, follows…etc.