I'm sure this could be applied to any site.. so hopefully someone can find time to hammer this one out.
What I want to do is hold online raffles once a month on our site. So essentially, this is what I want to do. Have a seperate page (doesn't have to be built into threads.. just need it to use some DB info). And on that page you can put a picture and type about the raffle and what the prize is and all that junk.
Then, have a small form on the bottom of the page where a user enters their full name and mailing address, the quantity of raffle tickets... then when they hit submit it forwards them a paypal address that you specify with the correct amount of money.
So for example, if someone wanted to buy 5 tickets and they are $1 a piece, when they hit submit, 5 virtual raffle tickets are credited towards their account, and they are forwarded to paypal to finish the purchase.
Then... have a very simple admin area of the raffle script where it tallys up all the entries.. hit a button, and spits out a winner (or more if you have more prizes). Fairly simple eh?
Ok, well.. that is a basic idea, although I did think of one glitch, and that is with the payment setup. What would could happen is people could submit the form for tickets.. which got entered, and then never pay via paypal. This would be bad, and would be easily exploited.
So my idea was when someone buys tickets, their tickets are flagged as pending approval. Then, when I see the paypal payment come in, I go to the raffle admin area and check them off as approved, so they are officially in the running.
I figure this would be an incredibly simple way to generate money for the site. For example we have 1600 members. If I purchased a 100 dollar Optima battery (which 90% of the users would want and use)... and charge $1 dollar per ticket, I know I could recoup the cost in a matter of hours most likely since most people will buy more th an 1 ticket.
So.. anyone else want something like this or up to the challenge of coding it?
