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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Multi-Round Giveaways

  1. RANDOM.ORG
  2. Multi-Round Giveaways
  3. FAQ

Q1: What is the Multi-Round Giveaway Service for?

If you run giveaways, the service lets you randomize your entrants (10,000 or less) and generates a verification code that proves the randomization is genuine. The service supports multiple rounds, which makes the giveaway suitable for broadcast in in real-time, e.g., via a live stream.

If you participate in giveaways, the service gives you a way to verify that what you saw in a live stream or a video was not rigged. For a long time, people used our List Randomizer for running giveaways, but a broadcaster can easily trick you by using a fake lookalike of our List Randomizer instead of the real thing. Not so with the Multi-Round Giveaway Service.

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Q2: How does it work?

Our How to Run a Giveaway guide takes you through the whole process, but we'll give a short summary here too.

When you run a giveaway, you paste your list of up to 10,000 participants into our form and select the number of rounds you want, or simply roll the dice for a random number of rounds. Then you randomize the rounds one at a time until you have your winner. In the final round, we generate a verification code, valid for one month, which proves your giveaway wasn't rigged.

Your winners are picked using true randomness that comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. RANDOM.ORG has generated true randomness since 1998 as described on our main site.

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Q3: What does it cost?

There are the following plans to choose from:

  • Pay as You Go
    $0.00 per month
    Giveaways cost $1.00 each
  • 100 Giveaways per Month
    $15.00 per month
    Extra giveaways cost $1.00 each
  • Unlimited Giveaways
    $25.00 per month
    Never run out!
  • Enterprise
    $300.00 per month
    API access; 3,000 giveaways included; extra giveaways cost $0.10 each

For further details, please see the Pricing Page.

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Q4: Can multiple people share a subscription to the Multi-Round Giveaway Service?

No, subscriptions are considered personal. If you would like to share a single subscription between multiple people in your organisation, you will need our Enterprise Plan. For more information, please get in touch.

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Q5: The List Randomizer is free. Why do I have to pay to use the Multi-Round Giveaway Service?

The List Randomizer was made in 2007 as a nifty tool for randomizing lists where the quality of the randomness was important. It was never envisioned as a giveaway tool, and for that reason we didn't include features to let people share or verify the results. People still use the List Randomizer for many other things than giveaways, so we didn't really want to change it a lot. At the same time, we realized that a lot of people wanted to run small giveaways, but didn't have the budget for our flagship Third-Party Draw Service. For this reason, we built the Multi-Round Giveaway Service as a good fit for small giveaways performed as live streams.

So, why does it cost money? First, we spent a lot of time developing and testing the new service, and we think it's fair to charge a small fee for it. Second, and as you may know, we offer a lot of free services (like the List Randomizer), but since we don't carry ads, we need to cover the costs of hosting, bandwidth and maintenance for those somehow. Finally, we can safely say that all our profits are currently going into building cool new services, many of which will be free, and we hope that you will benefit from those too some day. For these reasons, we hope you won't mind paying for the Multi-Round Giveaway Service. The alternative would have been to put ads on the giveaways or the verification pages, but we're not keen on ads. They take up space on your screen, make our services slow and ugly, and most people don't click on them anyway.

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Q6: Is there really a risk of fraud when using the List Randomizer?

Unfortunately, yes, and a very real one at that. Basically, you shouldn't trust the List Randomizer more than you trust the person using it. Our Fraud Warning contains more details about this, including actual videos of people running rigged giveaways using a fake lookalike of our List Randomizer. The Multi-Round Giveaway Service is safe, though.

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Q7: Can giveaway verification codes be forged?

People have asked if it's possible to ‘clone’ or otherwise forge the verification codes generated by the Multi-Round Giveaway Service. The answer is simply: no. If someone makes up a fake verification code, it will be exposed as soon as you enter it into our Verification Page. If the verification page tells you that a code checks out (and the result you see matches with what you saw in the live stream), then you can be sure the giveaway was genuine.

If a verification code doesn't check out, it can either have expired (each code lasts a month) or the person who ran the giveaway can be trying to scam you and the other participants. See Q11 for details on how to determine which is the case.

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Q8: Can someone cheat by running the same giveaway multiple times?

People have asked if it is possible for someone to keep running the same giveaway until they get the result they want and only publish the result then. While the Multi-Round Giveaway Service doesn't prevent this type of fraud per se, it does make it very easy to detect and expose.

Here is how to do the check:

  1. Open any giveaway run by the person in question. You can do this by clicking on a link to any of their giveaways or by entering a verification code for any of their giveaways into our Verification Page.
  2. On the resulting page, click on the button labeled ‘More giveaways by X’ (X is the name of the person who ran the giveaway). This will take you to a history of all the giveaways run by this person over the last month running.
  3. Look through the person's history. If the person ran the same giveaway twice, you will see it listed twice in their history.

This method works because it is not possible for someone to delete or hide giveaways from their history. Please see Q17, Q18 and Q19 for more details.

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Q9: Can someone cheat by using multiple accounts?

People have asked if it is possible for someone to maintain two or more RANDOM.ORG accounts and run the same giveaway with multiple accounts at the same time (e.g., in separate browsers or on separate computers) and then only publish the result that they want.

This type of fraud attempt is really a variation of the ‘cherry-picking’ attack described in Q8 above. While the Multi-Round Giveaway Service doesn't prevent this type of fraud per se, it makes it relatively easy detect and expose.

The easiest way to detect if someone is using multiple RANDOM.ORG accounts is to use the ‘Find Similar Accounts’ button, which you will find on any of their giveaways.

Screenshot showing where to find the ‘Find Similar Accounts’ button.

If someone is running giveaways using multiple accounts with the same (or very similar) public name, you will see each account listed as a separate search result. You can then compare the giveaway histories of the different accounts to see if they contain duplicate giveaways with different results. This approach works because everyone's giveaway histories are public and cannot be made private or excluded from our search function. Please see Q17, Q18 and Q19 for more details.

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Q10: Someone insists on using the List Randomizer for giveaways. Should I trust them?

Probably not, unless you know them personally, or the items they're giving away carry little or no value. With our monthly subscription plan, the Multi-Round Giveaway Service is so cheap that anyone who is serious about their giveaways can afford it. However, fraudsters know that they can use a fake lookalike of our List Randomizer to scam you (more about this in our Fraud Warning), and for that reason, it's in their interest to keep using the List Randomizer. Someone who is serious about their giveaways should have no problem using the Multi-Round Giveaway Service instead, simply because it's in their interest to show you they're being honest.

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Q11: What if I suspect someone of fraud?

If someone uses the Multi-Round Giveaway Service, you can easily check if they're being honest. Simply open our Verification Page in your browser and enter the verification code that appeared on the broadcaster's screen at the end of their giveaway. If RANDOM.ORG shows you a giveaway that matches what you saw in the live stream or recorded video, then the giveaway is genuine and you can trust the result.

If RANDOM.ORG tells you the giveaway doesn't exist, then the broadcaster is either trying to scam you (i.e., what you saw in the video of the giveaway was not the real RANDOM.ORG) or the verification code has expired. If RANDOM.ORG shows you a giveaway with a different outcome than what was in the video, then you know for certain that what you saw in the video was not the real RANDOM.ORG and the broadcaster is trying to scam you.

If you have a video of someone using the List Randomizer and you suspect they might be using the fake lookalike, please email us a copy of the video. We are dedicated to exposing fraudsters and will do everything we can to check its authenticity.

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Q12: Can I verify a giveaway that has expired?

Our Verification Page cannot verify a giveaway that has expired, but you can drop us an email and we'll have a look in our achives. A verification code is valid for one month, but we do keep the results of old giveaways around, even if they're not readily accessible.

Q13: Do the multiple rounds make the giveaways more random?

No, the giveaway result is already perfectly random after the first round. Subsequent rounds make it neither less nor more random. The reason we support multiple rounds is that people find it more exciting to watch. As with all our services, the Multi-Round Giveaway Service uses true randomness generated from atmospheric noise. If you'd like to learn more about this, check out the main RANDOM.ORG site.

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Q14: Can other people view a list of my giveaways?

Yes, if you use the Multi-Round Giveaway service, a public list of your recent (within the last month) giveaways will be automatically available at a URL like the following: https://giveaways.random.org/list/NNN

The value for NNN is a number that is unique for your account. You will also find the exact URL for your public list in your giveaway history.

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Q15: Can I see who has viewed my giveaways?

No. We do not require people to be logged in to view giveaways, so it is not possible for us to tell who has viewed them.

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Q16: What is the meaning of the number after my name in my public history?

One your public history page, you'll see a number in brackets, e.g., ‘Joe Bloggs (102).’ This number shows how many giveaways you have run over the last month running. Giveaways expire after a month, which means that this number will increase as you run more giveaways but decrease as the old giveaways expire.

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Q17: Can I make my giveaway history private?

People sometimes ask if it is possible to make their giveaway history private, i.e., not to display the list of all giveaways held with their account during the last month. For example, this can be desirable if you don't want your competitors to know how many giveaways you're running. Unfortunately, hiding the giveaway history is not possible because it would expose the service to fraudulent use. We'll try and explain how below.

A possible way for someone to try and rig the result is to run the same giveaway multiple times until they get the winner they want and then only publish that outcome. We call this a ‘cherry-picking’ attack, because the fraudster wants to pick their winners like one would pick only the best cherries from a tree.

Because the Multi-Round Giveaway Service ensures your giveaway history is visible, it is easy to detect this type of fraud using the approach we describe in Q8. By contrast, if the giveaway history were hidden, there would be no way to detect this type of fraud. While we understand there can be commercial concerns, integrity always takes priority for us.

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Q18: Can I make a giveaway private or hidden?

No, it is not possible to hide a giveaway. You can choose not to give out its verification code, but even then the giveaway will still appear in your public list of giveaways (see Q14).

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Q19: Can I delete a giveaway?

No, a giveaway automatically expires after a period of one month. It is not possible to delete a giveaway before it expires.

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Q20: How likely is it to get two identical rounds in succession?

You might be interested in this question as a result of reading our How to Run a Giveaway guide, where we happened to get two identical rounds in our example giveaway, or you might have encountered a giveaway where this happened to you. To human eyes, successive identical rounds may not look very random, but of course there is a chance it could happen. So, the question is: Exactly how likely is this to happen?

The answer depends on how many participants and how many rounds are in your giveaway. In the example giveaway, we had four participants being randomized over four rounds. So let's do some calculations. For each of those rounds, our four participants can be arranged in 4! = 4×3×2×1 = 24 ways. This means that when we go into any round (other than the first, which has no predecessor), the chance of getting the exact same result as we had in the previous round is 1 in 24, i.e., just over 4%. Hence, with only four participants, we should expect to see a round being identical to its predecessor roughly once for every 24 rounds, give or take.

But it's a little more complex than that. Our example giveaway has three rounds in which this could happen (since the first round does not have a predecessor). The following formula can be used to calculate the chance of getting a successive identical round in any giveaway. If n is the number of entries and r is the number of rounds in your giveaway, then the probability P can be calculated as:

P(n, r) = 1 − ((n − 1)! / n!) r

For our example giveaway where n=4 and r=4, this gives us a total chance of just under 12% of our giveaway having successive identical rounds. Hence, getting identical successive rounds with our four participants as happened in our example is a little out of the ordinary, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility. And if we do many rounds, we should expect it to happen pretty regularly.

If your giveaways are larger, the probability of identical successive rounds will be much smaller. To illustrate that, we've calculated the probability P(n, r) for a range of giveaways in the table below.

Entries (n) Rounds (r)
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
250.0000%75.0000%87.5000%93.7500%96.8750%98.4375%99.2188%
316.6667%30.5556%42.1296%51.7747%59.8122%66.5102%72.0918%
44.1667%8.1597%11.9864%15.6536%19.1681%22.5361%25.7637%
50.8333%1.6597%2.4792%3.2919%4.0978%4.8970%5.6895%
60.1389%0.2776%0.4161%0.5544%0.6925%0.8304%0.9682%
70.0198%0.0397%0.0595%0.0793%0.0992%0.1190%0.1388%
80.0025%0.0050%0.0074%0.0099%0.0124%0.0149%0.0174%

We've highlighted the cell in the table that corresponds to our example giveaway. You'll note that the chance of getting successive identical rounds drops very rapidly as the number of entries increases. The chance also increases (but much slower) as the number of rounds in your giveaway increases.

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Q21: Do the entrant names affect people's chances?

People have asked if it is possible for entrants to affect their chances of winning, for example by choosing very long names, or by adding special characters or symbols to them. For example, consider a giveaway with the following entries:

John Doe
Jane Doe
🔥🔥🔥Jill Doe🔥🔥🔥
John Q. Public

Will Jill Doe have a different chance of winning than the other entrants? The answer to this question is a clear NO – it makes no difference what characters or symbols appear in the names, or how long the names are.

To explain why, we will go into a little more detail about how the service works.

Every time you click the ‘Next Round’ or ‘Final Round’ buttons, the service generates a brand new sequence of non-repeating random numbers using true randomness from atmospheric noise. The length of the sequence corresponds to the number of entries in your giveaway. For example, if you have four entries, the sequence will consist of the numbers 0–3 (inclusive) in random order. If you have twenty entries, the sequence will consist of the numbers 0–19 in random order. The service then uses this sequence of random numbers to reorder your entries.

(As an aside, you may wonder why we number the entries from 0 and upwards, and not from 1 as may seem more conventional. The answer is that numbering from 0 and upwards simplifies a lot of calculations, so most programming languages do this and as a consequence we do too. Hence, in our entrant list, we consider John Doe entrant #0, Jane Doe #1, Jill Doe #2, and John Q. Public #3. However, these are the internal details of the service, and it is perfectly fine to think of John Doe as the 1st entrant.)

For example, our How to Run a Giveaway guide uses the same entrant list shown above (although without the flames around Jill's name). When we ran that giveaway, the service generated the following random sequence for the first round:

3, 1, 2, 0

This random sequence was then used to reorder the entrant names, such that John Q. Public came 1st, Jane Doe came 2nd, and so on and so forth. This resulted in the following result of the first round:

John Q. Public (#3 in our original entrant list)
Jane Doe (#1 in our original entrant list)
Jill Doe (#2 in our original entrant list)
John Doe (#0 in our original entrant list)

Every subsequent round generated a different random sequence and reordered the entrants anew.

In this way, the service randomizes your entries without looking at the entries at all. And for that reason, it does not matter if an entrant has special characters or symbols in their name, or if their name is long or short.

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Q22: Can browser cache settings affect people's chances?

People have asked if it is possible for a giveaway organizer to affect the outcome of a giveaway by tampering with their browser cache, or by not clearing their browser cache before a giveaway.

The answer to this question is a clear NO. The Multi-Round Giveaway Service is built in such a way that the randomization of a round is never cached by the organizer's browser. This is also the case if the browser is unable to contact RANDOM.ORG, for example if the organizer's Internet connection has dropped. In this case, the Multi-Round Giveaway Service will display an error message indicating that it could not reach RANDOM.ORG. In particular, it will not re-use any old (or cached) results, even if RANDOM.ORG is unavailable.

For the same reason, it makes no difference whether the organizer clears their browser cache before running a giveaway with the Multi-Round Giveaway Service.

Even if a technically savvy person rigged their browser to cache results, the verification code shown at the end would expose the fraud. For more information about how verification codes work, please see Q11.

For readers interested in the technical details, we can give a little more information. RANDOM.ORG uses JSON-RPC 2.0 for all our APIs, including the Multi-Round Giveaway Service. JSON-RPC 2.0 relies exclusively on HTTP POST requests, which are generally used for operations that are specifically not idempotent. (An operation is idempotent if performing it multiple times is guaranteed to give the same result every time.) Nearly all our API methods generate true randomness in one form or another, so very few of our methods are idempotent. For this reason, JSON-RPC 2.0 (and hence, HTTP POST) is a good choice for us.

For more information about how the rounds are generated and why it's not possible for the organizer to affect them, please see Q21.

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Q23: Can browser cookies be used to affect people's chances?

People have asked if it is possible for a giveaway organizer to affect the outcome of a giveaway by tampering with the browser cookies.

The answer to this question is a clear NO. The Multi-Round Giveaway Service does not consider any cookies set by the browser when generating the randomizations for the rounds. For more information about how the rounds are generated and why it's not possible for the organizer to affect them, please see Q21.

For more information about how RANDOM.ORG uses cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Q24: Can I run practice giveaways?

People have asked if it's possible to run free giveaways for test or practice purposes, for example to familiarize yourself with the service.

While there isn't an option to do practice giveaways per se, but you can run practice giveaways as regular giveaways and marking them clearly as practice ones, for example by adding the word ‘TEST’ to the description. This will make it clear to anyone looking at your giveaways that they shouldn't be considered real giveaways.

However, please note that such giveaways will still count as real giveaways for the purposes of your subscription. This means that unless you have an Unlimited Giveaways subscription, they will still incur a fee or count towards your maximum monthly number of giveaways.

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Q25: How do I record or broadcast a video of my giveaway?

If you just want to record what happens on your screen while you're narrating, there are several solutions depending on your operating system and budget. Wikipedia has a good comparison of screencasting software.

If you want to do a live broadcast, you'll want to use a screencast solution, such as Screencast-O-Matic.

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Q26: Why is the running time different from the timestamp shown when the giveaway is finished?

When you're running a giveaway, you will see a running time displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. This time is taken from the clock on your device. When your giveaway is completed, you will see a timestamp displayed in the main area. This timestamp is the official RANDOM.ORG server time when your giveaway completed, and it will also appear on the verification page for the giveaway.

Step 8: Round #4 - Final Result

Sometimes, you may see a discrepancy between the timestamp and the running time. For example, the timestamp could be 30 seconds before or after the running time. The reason for the difference (if you see one) is that the clock on your device (where the running time comes from) may not be completely synchronized with RANDOM.ORG's servers (where the timestamp comes from).

Any discrepancy between the timestamp and the running time has no bearing on the randomness or integrity of your giveaway. All the critical timestamps are allocated by our servers, so they should be considered authoritative, even if the running time shown during the giveaway is a little different. To make sure RANDOM.ORG's timestamps are as accurate as possible, we keep our server's clocks synchronized with Google's atomic clocks.

If you see a discrepancy between the timestamps and the running time and you want to do something about it, the best way is to make sure your device is synchronized with a public time service. Your OS manufacturer most likely offers one, and there are also alternatives, such as time.gov, which is operated by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology.

For example, if you are using an iOS device, the following steps will ensure that your device is synchronized with Apple's time service:

  1. Open the ‘Settings’ app and go to ‘General,’ then to ‘Date & Time’
  2. Toggle the switch for ‘Set Automatically’ to the ON position (if this is already set ON, turn it OFF for about 15 seconds, then toggle it back ON to refresh)
  3. Be sure the Time Zone setting is set properly for your region
  4. Exit out of Settings

You will find instructions for different types of devices here:

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Q27: Why did I see strange jumps in the rounds in February 2022?

During 10-19 February 2022, the Multi-Round Giveaway Service was affected by a problem in which a giveaway round could sometimes appear to glitch, for example resulting in an extra ‘ghost round’ being shown, or the service could appear to return to a previous round that had already been completed and then skip forward again.

While this was confusing to viewers of videos in which the glitch appeared, it did not reduce the quality of the randomness or affect the final outcome of the giveaway. Similarly, the integrity of the record of the giveaway was unaffected.

The issue was caused by a bug in a service called Cloudflare that RANDOM.ORG uses to improve the performance of the services, including the Multi-Round Giveaway Service. Specifically, Cloudflare's load balancing functionality stopped supporting session affinity correctly as discussed in the Cloudflare support forums.

The RANDOM.ORG team installed an update on 19 February 2022, which solved the problem. We also reported the issue to Cloudflare, which confirmed that their engineering team was working to develop a solution at their end. Cloudflare deployed this solution on 24 February 2022.

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Q28: I have a question that isn't answered in the FAQ. Can you help?

We are happy to take additional questions! Just drop us an email.

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