Its been a long time since anyone has posted to this thread, but i searched for this topic and here it is!
I too am thinking about something to this effect... While YES it may be illegal in certain areas to offer raffles for money, im pretty sure its not illegal to do it for free...
I was thinking about how this could be done so that it would be legal, but also help benifit our websites... And came up with this idea....
Those of us here who have "supporting members".. members who have dontated, or paid for memberships on our sites.. Espcially ones who have made hacks to our sites to give those users speecial groups with the little gifs next to their names etc... Those users are given special group numbers...
If we could get a hack or software that when you would push (click) a button, it would pull the information (username and email address) of only those users with certain specified user groups, and put them into its own database listing... Then you could click another button, and it would draw a username, send them an email and post their name as a winner somewhere on the site (a-la sometime like the "there is # users in chat" header thingy)...
I have seen some software
http://www.yourphppro.com/ where he has a raffle script, and i have talked to this guy before about it... I am going to see if there is a way he can make his program simply retrieve the user info we want and do the raffle from that software...
Doing it this way, you dont charge for a raffle. You simple reward those who have supported your website with donations or memberships. I dont think that would be illegal.
Deejay