Competitions

Description
Adds a competition module to your forums. You can create as many competitions and allow members to participate in them.

Features

• Ability to force participants to fill certain custom profile fields
• Send Private Message to members who participate in the competitions
• Ability to allow more than one entry from a participant
• Input field for answers can be either a textbox, a textarea, radio buttons or a drop-down menu
• If the input type is radio buttons or a drop-down menu, the system can filter out wrong answers and generate a list of winners by picking random participants
• Schedule competitions by setting the starting date (user contributed)
• Very customizable

Installation

1. Upload all necessary files to their respective directories.
2. Install the product XML file.
3. Edit the navbar template to add a link to competitions.php page. (see below)
4. Set necessary permissions for each usergroup to access and/or participate in competitions.
5. Edit the "hkc_nopermission_loggedin" and "hkc_winner_congratulate_message" phrase to customize to your taste.

Upgrade

1. Upload all necessary files to their respective directories.
2. Install the product XML file. Be sure to set "Allow Overwrite" to Yes.

Editing the navbar template

1. Open the navbar template

2. Find:

<td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="calendar.php$session[sessionurl_q]">$vbphrase[calendar]</a></td>

3. Add after:

<td class="vbmenu_control"><a href="competitions.php$session[sessionurl_q]">$vbphrase[hkc_competitions]</a></td>

4. Save template

Author Notes
This extension was developed specifically for my website but I am releasing the code since a few members here have have shown interest. I cannot state that it is totally free of bugs. I would appreciate your feedback in making this extension better.

Maybe in Future
At the moment, the question is only restricted to one per competition. I would like to have the ability to add more than one question per competition.

[MSheraz86]

Thanks a lot

[FROGGYJ]

1)when I start a new competition I have to set the date 1 day ahead to actually end on the day I want. So for example if I want to end the competition on Dec 23...I have to set the date to Dec 24th. Weird thing is if I go to edit the competition after setting it up it shows Dec 23.....???

2)how can we change what time the competition ends? Currently they all end at 5pm on the given day. Is there somewhere we can change the time?

3)also I often do giveaways and members simply have to reply to a thread. This would be more useful though...but not sure how to configure properly. I can setup a radio button and check it as default so its their only option....but will that work so at the end of the competition time I just hit select winner and it will randomly select someone from all the entries even though there is no "correct answer"....guess I can test this.

4)even though read receipt is selected I never get a receipt back from a user who does hit send read receipt.

[husain]

Originally Posted by FROGGYJ

1)when I start a new competition I have to set the date 1 day ahead to actually end on the day I want. So for example if I want to end the competition on Dec 23...I have to set the date to Dec 24th. Weird thing is if I go to edit the competition after setting it up it shows Dec 23.....???

2)how can we change what time the competition ends? Currently they all end at 5pm on the given day. Is there somewhere we can change the time?

I am aware of this and have been trying to study how vBulletin handles dates. What the hack is doing right now is that it is ending competitions depending on the GMT setting. So if you competiton ends on 31st Dec and your timezone is set to GMT+5, it will end the competition on 31st Dec at 5am.

I know this is not a desired effect and I am working on it.

Originally Posted by FROGGYJ

3)also I often do giveaways and members simply have to reply to a thread. This would be more useful though...but not sure how to configure properly. I can setup a radio button and check it as default so its their only option....but will that work so at the end of the competition time I just hit select winner and it will randomly select someone from all the entries even though there is no "correct answer"....guess I can test this.

If you want to use the "select winner" feature you will have to set the correct answer.

This is what I had done for one competition. My sponsors were giving a way a Westlife album but they wanted everyone to be able to enter without answering a question (because some may answer incorrectly and they didn't want that). So I created a competition without specifying a question and said "to enter, simply type WESTLIFE in the field below and hit submit". The text box also had the default value of WESTLIFE. The correct answer field was also set to WESTLIFE. In that way, everyone entered, everyone got the correct answer and I was able to select a winner using Get Winner. There was also no need to create a thread for people to reply (and increase their postcount for no reason).

[FROGGYJ]

thanks husain! There is only 1 more feature which would really make this perfect and that is usergroup permissions. I often have giveaways only for site supporters and hence why I have a giveaway forum in which only site supporters can post. If you could build in some sort of permissions settings for this app....that would be awesome.

[husain]

The hack already has built-in usergroup permissions that you can use for this. So if you want to restrict a particular usergroup from participating in the competition, you can edit the permissions of that usergroup.

[FROGGYJ]

haha nevermind, I had actually already edited them correctly...just forgot. Thanks for the quick response!

[ChrisBaktis]

i have looked and looked but cannot seem to find the admincp option to delete an entry....any help?

[husain]

There is no option to delete an entry at the moment. It will be added in a future release of the hack.

[ChrisBaktis]

oh ok - there was another post that said you could delete entries via admincp - looking forward to that feature being added.

[FOZ13]

I have ongoing monthly competitions, based on 1 usergroup which is for the financial members only.

Has anyone created a hack that will draw a random winner from a specific user group?