The Secret Santa Robot
The Secret Santa robot was created to get around a problem we had with doing a Secret Santa for our friends: namely making it truly a surprise and making sure that no one got their own partner as a possible receiver. I designed it pretty simply in PHP, since it is a fairly straight forward sort of algorithm and then decided to make it a part of this site (here).
The in-site version is slightly better than the original idea I had, since this will let you add as many people as you like and it then emails them all their secret santa person. You can only restrict a person from giving to one other person and, annoyingly, there's no way I know around some people's emails putting stuff in the spam bin, which is why I provided a single central email that copies are sent to.
It seems to work okay, though. I need to get around to adding in a box to put special instructions in, i.e. so you could tell everyone what the maximum price is or even where to meet. I put an API together for it and now I need to make an app to go and use with it. That's going to take a whole other section of work, though!
The in-site version is slightly better than the original idea I had, since this will let you add as many people as you like and it then emails them all their secret santa person. You can only restrict a person from giving to one other person and, annoyingly, there's no way I know around some people's emails putting stuff in the spam bin, which is why I provided a single central email that copies are sent to.
It seems to work okay, though. I need to get around to adding in a box to put special instructions in, i.e. so you could tell everyone what the maximum price is or even where to meet. I put an API together for it and now I need to make an app to go and use with it. That's going to take a whole other section of work, though!