This maybe a stupid question (my apologies) so bear with me. I've never used random.org before but I've seen goggers use it to choose winners for giveaways. I would like to do my own giveaways soon so I wanted to know how to use it to choose winners please?

I would just go with post numbers.

Well, while I haven't used it before, GOG forum gives each post in topic a number (hover over post to see it) so simply put 2 (as first post is yours) as minimum number and last post as highest number and get random number between those two. Or that's how it seems to work for me.

Thanks very much guys. :)

It's good of you to think of doing giveaways. I'm sure many of us will appreciate it.

I had manually typed (or copy/pasted) the name of all the contestants in a separate .txt file, and copied/pasted the list on random.org.

Just keep in mind that you can wind up with duplicate entries that you need to worry about. Unless you want to reward people for multiposting.

Then there's the jerks that post to say thanks for the generosity and +1, but I don't want one. Not sure what sort of monster would do that. *whistlesnonchalantly*

This is basically what I did, because if you just do it by post numbers then you get messed up by multiple posts from the same person or by posts that aren't entries. I just put them all in a list, and then used the random integer function to pick one.

That's what I did, too, then I let random.org shuffle the list, that is put it in a random order, number all entries and then draw a random number between 1 and the number of entries.

Isn't that a bit redundant ?

I just shuffled them and designated the 1st entry of the shuffled list as the winner...

I'm sure it's possible to script doing that rather than by hand. Unfortunately, the site is optimized for display, not for running this sort of contest.

I took a look at the page source and it looks like one could filter for(with the rest of the tag, obviously):
div class="small_user_name" hedwards /div
div class="small_icon" /div
div class="small_text" Comment buried. span id="unhide_7" class="unhide" Unhide /span /div

and remove the newlines to create a list of posts. Then one could eliminate any usernames that show up more than once. Followed by appending a line number for use in the contest. And one could manually verify that the person intended to enter before announcing it.

All that is more or less trivial to do in *NIX, not sure how you'd do that in Windows though.

EDIT: Or just have it shuffle that list.

Ok, now I'm thinking I should go with names instead of post numbers because (as people have said already) it eliminates errors from multiple posts etc.

Of course, that works, too, but where's the fun in that? ;)

Hm.

*checks old giveaway list*

*randomizes*

11. AFnord. You've won a 6$ giveaway. :-/

This.