Ythan said:

So, we select a winner for the ban lottery using a pseudorandom number generator (specifically MySql's ORDER BY RAND). While not cryptographically secure, the results are statistically uniform so each entry has an equal chance of being selected. Any apparent pattern in results is either due to how frequently different people enter, or just the luck of the draw. Of course, that's exactly what I'd say if I actually was fixing the results. And you'd never know the difference.



I can add a leaderboard, I was just wary of introducing more clutter to the page. But these days it's easy to make it collapsible. So that's implemented, you can click the "Complete rankings" link to view all the winners.

The problem with the more advanced statistics you envision is that we've never saved all ban lotto entries. Back when it was created in 2005 I had no idea it would go on to become such a fixture in OTD. Originally we'd just select a winner, post the automatic announcement, and then clear the entries for next week. It was years later when I added information about past winners on the ban lottery page, and I had to go back through the thread and extract that information from the automatic announcements to populate the results initially. But there wasn't a way to find historic information about who entered, so any implementation would only work going forward. That would exclude a lot of all time OTD greats from consideration, so I decided to forego that functionality. But I have given the ban lottery some love in recent memory when I added the shower thoughts for the winners.

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Ythan said:

I can add a leaderboard, I was just wary of introducing more clutter to the page. But these days it's easy to make it collapsible. So that's implemented, you can click the "Complete rankings" link to view all the winners.

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