I have experienced a number of Rafflecopter problems since I started using it with giveaways. This post is to inform my readers and other blog owners of issues they may encounter while entering/hosting giveaways that use the Rafflecopter form.
Because Rafflecopter is still in Beta I have personally decided to continue to use it (We all know how much easier it is to use than the old way!) and hope that the issues will be resolved eventually.
Info For Those Entering Rafflecopter Giveaways On This Blog
- If you clear your cookies and then come back to tweet every day as a form of extra entry, or you’ve previously entered but forgot that you did and have since cleared your cookies, you will more than likely have to fill out the mandatory entry in order to ‘unlock’ the rafflecopter form. (It will appear as though you never entered). If you’ve ever wondered why that was happening, now you know.
- When you clear your cookies, as mentioned above, and fill in the mandatory entry AGAIN it will create another entry in the form. This means you will have several entries that are not valid. I (and other blog owners) personally have to go through and delete all extra entries. Each blog owner using Rafflecopter should be doing this, lest all entrants odds of winning be completely skewed.
- Because it is unlikely some of you are willing to stop deleting your cookies (hey we all like our privacy, right?) You will be required to leave a blog comment on my actual blog. This serves a very good purpose. If you come back tomorrow and can’t remember if you entered or not (because the form reset) all you have to do is search for your name among the blog comments. It can be as simple as pressing CTRL + F if you don’t want to manually scroll through them. If you already entered, please don’t fill out the rafflecopter form again.. unless you HAVE TO because it is locked (as a result of deleting your cookies).
- Comments on the blog are not added in to the entries. Your entry is when you actually fill out the rafflecopter form. If you win I then look in my comment section and make sure you left a comment fulfilling the mandatory entry. So if all you do is leave a comment on the blog you’re not actually entering!! It’s a 2 step process. Leave comment, fill out rafflecopter form. No need to put anything in the extra info section. I will see your comments on my blog. Another reason for doing this is that companies actually like to read real responses to their products & have real interaction. Rafflecopter is taking away a lot of that, hence the request to leave an actual comment. Thank you for understanding.
Info For Blog Owners Running Rafflecopter Giveaways
If you host giveaways on your blog I hope you are checking your rafflecopter entries. You WILL find duplicates & extra invalid mandatory entries. Once entrants clear their cookies it is possible for them to come back each day & create a new mandatory entry because the form will reset and look to them as though they never entered. They may also be coming back simply to retweet, but be forced to re-enter their info in the mandatory entry to “unlock” the form. I have also seen several extra tweet entries, which seems to mean that they are able to tweet more than once and put in their info again and again. You need to sort by name, ip, email, various ways to make sure you are deleting all the invalid entries. Otherwise your giveaway odds are totally skewed. As someone who loves entering giveaways herself, this would make me sad 
Don’t believe me? Check your entries! Go ahead, have a look. That person with 25 entries? Bet some of them are double.
What Do Other People Think of Rafflecopter?
These are some great posts that actually helped me to discover some of the known issues with rafflecopter. A lot of bloggers seem to be unaware or just don’t talk about it, but not these blogs. You might want to check them out. They’re very informative. Big thanks to the blog owners.
My Impression of Rafflecopter from Great Gobs of Glamorous Giveaways
More Observations On Rafflecopter from Great Gobs of Glamorous Giveaways
Giveaway Bloggers – How to Manually Review Rafflecopter Entries to Keep It Fair from Rachel’s Reviews & Giveaways
Questions? Comments? Problems??
If you have any questions, or you had issues with the form please leave a comment on the blog so I can see it. I’ll get back to you! I want everyone to have a fair shot so if you need help please don’t hesitate to ask!!
If you’ve noticed other issues with Rafflecopter feel free to tell me about them so that I can update this post.
Good Luck~!
Thank you SO much for this information! I have gone back to giveaways that I KNOW I have entered and found the form reset. I wondered whether my initial entries were still there.
Thanks for mentioning my blog article, I really appreciate it. I’ve been meaning to write an update post because I see a new issue. Since Rafflecopter changed the form, people aren’t having to do the mandatory entry multiple times to ‘unlock’ daily entries, which is a good thing.
What I’m seeing now is people who enter, clear their cookies, then come back a few days later and do all the entries again. So like you mentioned, a person should only have 10 entries suddenly unfairly has 20, and this would only be detected if the blogger hosting it checks all the entries and deletes the duplicates (it sounds like most bloggers don’t do this).
It’s worth noting that all this is temporary since Greg told me they are working on a sign-in system. There will be no more cookies and users will be able to see what they’ve already entered. I think we just have to stick it out, but be aware of the glitches.
Pingback: Enter to Win a Hardcover Copy of @Entenmanns Big Book of Baking–Out 9/27/11 From @parragonbooks | First-Time-Mommy
Thank you for the info! I am just starting to use Rafflecopter on my blog for giveaways and have come across some duplicate entries. Most of the time the people were honest and told me but as we know there are others who don’t. I do love how easy it is to use (and enter) so I guess I will just have to be vigilant until the can fix the problem.
Pingback: Win a Limited Ed. STAR WARS: The Complete Saga Big G Cereal Prize Pack (incl $25 Wal-mart Gift Card) #Myblogspark | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Win $20 in Fresh Fruit Coupons from @DelMonteFresh in Honor of the Cash for Classrooms Contest (4 win.) | First-Time-Mommy
Thanks for all the information!! I always wondered why when I’d come back to do a daily tweet or add a giveaway why it was blank like I hadn’t entered at all. I seriously didn’t think my entries would have went through and entered my entries again. I only had this happen a few times though. I’m glad to know this now so thanks for sharing. I’m not a huge fan of Rafflecopter so far just because of some of the issues I’ve had but like you said it’s a work in process so that’s fair enough. I’ve only won one giveaway through Rafflecopter which was from “Rachel’s Giveaways” she’s so sweet! I was happy that I finally won. It does make me wonder now that alot of people aren’t checking for extra entries and could be a reason why I’ve never won. Rachel does so that makes sense why I won finally. Hopefully they get it fixed soon because if someone is doing it intentionally to get more entries that’s just not right!
Thanks for the blog post…I have just started using rafflecopter and have not chosen a winner yet, so it is good to know to look for duplicate entries…and how to direct entrants if they run into problems with having to reenter. I myself am having issues of my first entry form showing up on my most currently posted giveaway…but then not showing up on my other giveaways. This is just on my home page. They do have the correct forms on the specific pages. I just dont like how it looks on the homepage. I think it is confusing to my readers. I havent gottena reply back from raffelcopter on why this is happening and this is how I found your post.
No problem Colleen. Thanks for taking the time to leave a message. I have read that you can only have 1 rafflecopter form showing on your main page. So what you’ll need to do is in each one of your rafflecopter giveaway posts you have to insert a “split post” so that the rafflecopter form only shows up once you click “read more” or when you click on the direct link of the post. Someone visiting your homepage won’t see the rafflecopter form.
Hope that helps!!
Also, I had contact with the owners of rafflecopter and there are a lot of good changes coming soon. Hopefully this issue will be resolved as well!
Thanks Monica for checking that out for me. Too funny that we are working on the same post. I have never done the split forms so I guess I will have to check that out…because otherwise it just looks confusing. Thanks!
Pingback: Tell Us The One Product You Couldn’t Live Without As A First-Time-Mom & Enter To Win Born Free Eco-Classic Baby Bottles | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Prepare For The Holidays With The Febreze Carpet Care Thanksgiving Giveaway ($100 Amex GC + more) | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Enter To Win a Kroger Gift Card ($25) And Learn How You Can Receive Free Milk For Your Purchases Nov 13-26 #Myblogspark | First-Time-Mommy
Thanks for sharing my posts on rc. A lot of the problems I initially had on rc have been resolved. Not all. Some, in my opinion, persist.
I am beginning to think some of the problems I have are related to using MacOS X and Safari. I don’t use my Win7 laptop much, but when I do, I get the impression that rc works better. That might be just an impression. (I use Safari on Win7, too.)
I just finished filling out your rc form. I went to another page and came back. All the entries had reset to not having been done… Cause???? Who knows…
Pingback: Carmex Healing Cream & Lotion–The Perfect Stocking Stuffer- Review & #Give-Away | First-Time-Mommy
I’ve noticed a problem with tweeting using rafflecopter.
First of all I DO understand that the problem is not rafflecopter.
I wrote to twitter @support to tell them of the problem. This problem
never happened until they forced me to switch to the new twitter.
The problem is that when a rafflecopter entry has a tweet button, I
right-click my mouse on it, and open it in a new tab(I use firefox, but I
doubt that the browser is the problem). The tweet text appears in the
box, and I click on the tweet button. After it has successfully
submitted, we then see ‘View
it on Twitter’ – I right-click and copy that url and paste it
into the rafflecopter entry Extra Info box. Easy enough. Unfortunately, if
one double-clicks on the ‘View
it on Twitter’ one often sees a prior tweet, not the current tweet. This is due to new twitter being so slow, that the ‘View
it on Twitter’ url is the one they grabbed from what they think is our last tweet.
This means that most of the blogs that I tweet for an entry for, I’m pasting in the wrong tweet URL.
I am hoping that you, and all the blogs that use rafflecopter can put
some pressure on twitter to bring the old twitter back, or fix the delay
problem with the new twitter.
Thanks!
Pingback: My Very Merry Christmas–Personalized Board Book For Kids–Review & Giveaway | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Flicka, Ricka, Dicka and Their New Skates–Book Review & Giveaway | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Spread Some #Cheer With Cheerios–Giveaway #MyBlogSpark | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: RetailMeNot Black Friday-Cyber Monday Giveaway | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Make Your Own Holiday Cards This Year -MyPublisher Review & Giveaway ($50 credit) | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Review & Giveaway (25 Readers Will Win Free A Free Product) #fiberpluscoupon | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Mertado.com Coral Springs Home Plush Blanket–Review & Giveaway | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Find Out How To Throw The Perfect Chex Party Mix-Change & Enter To Win A $25 Sam’s Club Gift Card #Myblogspark | First-Time-Mommy
Pingback: Freschetta Proud To Support Pink Giveaway – Win a Free Pizza & Pink Earphones For You & a Friend (Now Closed) | First-Time-Mommy