How to Track RSS Subscribers in a Blog Contest
Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Ask Salomon under Blogging Tips, ContestsLet me start off by saying that this post will not talk about how to get sponsors, how to determine prizes, or how to determine rules for a blog contest. This post will talk about how to tweak your WordPress blog to solve the biggest problem in running a blog contest to gain RSS subscribers.
Problem
The issue here is that there is no easy way to track if each contestant has actually subscribed to your RSS feed. Without the ability to confirm RSS subscription, anybody can just claim that they have subscribed to your feed and get a free entry into the contest.
Solution
A known solution to this problem is to include a special contest code into your RSS feed and not have this code visible on your website. That way each contestant will be forced to grab the code from your feed and submit the code via comments to verify that they have subscribed to the RSS feed. To implement this solution with the minimum amount of effort you will need to do the following two things:
1. Include the special contest code into your RSS feed
You can automatically do this by adding the following code snippet to your theme’s functions.php. The following code will make the text “Special Contest Code: yourcodehere” show up at the end of each post in the RSS feed, but not show up on your website.
function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'Special Contest Code: yourcodehere';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
Make sure you change “yourcodehere” to your own special contest code.
2. Automatically censor all comments with the code in it
You can automatically hide all RSS confirmation code in your comments by including the following code snippet into your functions.php:
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('yourcodehere', '[code hidden]',
$comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');
Once the contest is over, you can lock the comments on that post and remove the following line to have all confirmation codes reappear for validation:
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');
Why is Does This Work?
Simply because you do not have to deal with the contest again until your contest is over. Your special contest code is hidden from view, so there is no way of cheating. Once your contest is over, you can just un-hide the contest codes, tally up the participants, and [randomly] pick your winners.
Do you think you have a better method of tracking RSS subscribers in a contest? If so, please share in the comments section.
Source: www.weblogtoolscollection.com
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