It is exactly one week to go before the end of our Blockbuster Domaining Contest!

Tomorrow, we will publish the list of 25 .TV domains that we will be giving away, compliments of eBusinessDomains.com.

Today, I want to explain how we will select the winners next week.

Each prize will be randomly drawn. We were thinking of getting a contest script to do the honours for us, but rather than testing various scripts, we thought, why not use the good old Excel?

So we will be using the Microsoft Excel RANDBETWEEN worksheet function.

Each point earned in the contest is worth 1 chance of winning a prize. What we will do is give each point/chance a unique number. We will refer to this number as a ticket number.

So, lets say, you have entered the contest, and you have earn the 10 points, we will give you a sequential block of 10 numbers, lets say 1 to 10 (1,2,3, etc).

The next contestant would get the next set of sequential numbers, for example between 11 and 20 (11, 12, 13, 14…20).

Each contestant will get a block of sequential numbers based on the number of points/chances that they have.

Once all the contestants have been assigned unique ticket numbers for all of their points, we will then start executing the draws.

We will do this by executing the Microsoft Excel RANDBETWEN worksheet function for every single prize.

So lets say, we have 100 contestants with 10 points each. That will be 10 x100 = 1,000 unique ticket numbers.

The ticket numbers will run from 1 to 1,000.

We will then run the function:
=RANDBETWEEN(1,1000)

The function will randomly return a number between 1 and 1,000. Let’s say that the number returned is 199.

We will then award that prize to the contestant with ticket number 199.

I hope you get the picture.

I am taking this step to explain the draw methodology for transparency purposes. The prizes are really quite valuable! Some sort of “draw out of a hat” won’t select the winners.

Each contestant will have a truly fair chance of winning. If during the draw, the spreadsheet function returns a number that has already been drawn, we will re-execute the function until a brand new number/ticket is drawn. We will only award one prize per contestant.

PLEASE NOTE: simply joining the forum will not get you into the contest. You have to make a valid post. No spam please. We have already banned quite a few users making spam posts.

Note that there are quite a few ways of earning a load of points, for example tweeting about the contest on Twitter.

Our prize-draw decisions will be final.

Click here to read more about our Blockbuster Domaining Contest.

Good luck. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to ask.

PS: If the RANDBETWEEN spreadsheet function does not work with your version of Microsoft Excel, try using Help, as you will need to install the Analysis ToolPak Add-in via the Tools menu.