🎡 SpinForFree

How to Use the Wheel

This walks through building a wheel in SpinForFree and running a live draw, from a blank account to a published winner. It covers the settings that matter and, more usefully, which one to pick for a given situation. Most of them are obvious once you know what they are for and easy to get wrong before then.

Do you need an account at all?

Start here, because half of what people want does not need one. The wheel on the home page is free and immediate: type names in, press spin, done. It draws in your own browser with a cryptographic random source, keeps your list between visits, and never sends anything to a server.

For a classroom pick, a stand-up order or deciding where to eat, that is the whole job and an account adds nothing. An account is worth it when other people need to witness the draw:

  • One shared link that spins live on every screen at the same instant, rather than each viewer generating their own result.
  • The draw made on the server and written down before it reaches any browser, so nobody, including you, can reload their way to a different outcome.
  • A timestamped history of every spin, which is what you point at when somebody questions a result a week later.
  • Self-service entries, scheduling, stream mode and payout receipts.

Rule of thumb: if a prize is involved, or anyone might dispute the result, use an account. Otherwise use the free wheel.

1. Create your wheel

After you sign up, one wheel is already waiting on your dashboard. Give it a name, whether that is the event, the class, or the giveaway, and open it to start adding entries. Name it for the occasion rather than something generic, since the name appears on the shared link and on the winners page. “March Newsletter Draw” is doing work that “My Wheel” is not.

2. Add names

Type names in one at a time, or paste a whole list, one per line or separated by commas or semicolons. Duplicates are skipped automatically, so pasting a messy roster twice will not double anyone’s odds by accident. Each name gets a colour that does not clash with the others already on the wheel; override any of them by hand if you want a specific look.

Names stay legible up to roughly 150 entries. Past that the slices are too thin to print a label in, so the wheel drops the text rather than overlapping it. The draw itself is unaffected, and a 400-entry raffle works fine, it just stops being readable as a picture. If you need the audience to see individual names, keep the list shorter or draw in rounds.

3. Set the odds, if you need to

By default every name gets an equal slice. If some entries should have better or worse odds, whether for extra raffle tickets, seniority, or a handicap, give them a weight instead. The wheel redraws itself to scale, so the size of each slice always matches its real probability. Nobody has to take your word for the odds; they can see them.

Keep weights small and round. 1, 2 and 5 are legible to an audience; 7 against 13 against 22 is arithmetic nobody in the room is going to do. And if you are weighting a public draw, say so when you announce it, because the wheel makes it visible either way and there is nothing to gain from leaving it unmentioned. The worked example is here.

4. Configure how the draw behaves

  • Spin duration, from a snappy second to a drawn-out twenty. One second for repeated picks where the novelty has worn off; five to eight for an audience, where the wait is the part people enjoy. Twenty seconds is for a single headline draw and nothing else.
  • Elimination mode, where each winner drops off the wheel after they are picked, so a raffle never lands on the same person twice. Turn this on for anything that should work through a list: multiple prizes, a speaking order, a rota.
  • Bench a name, which toggles someone off for a single round without deleting them; their win count and history stay intact and they are back next spin. Use this for the student who is absent or the entrant who turned out to be ineligible, rather than deleting and re-adding them, which loses their record.
  • Schedule a spin, arming the wheel to draw itself at a set time, once or repeating daily or weekly. Anyone on the share link sees a live countdown, then the result. This has a property a live draw does not: nobody is at the keyboard when it fires, so there is no version of events in which the organiser kept spinning until they liked the outcome.
  • Double wheel, where one draw becomes two spins: the name wheel picks a winner, then a second wheel spins for what they get. Both weighted and both drawn the same way. Useful for a prize pool where you would otherwise be typing the prize in by hand.

5. Share it

Every wheel gets one link. Anyone who opens it watches the exact same spin land on the exact same name at the exact same moment. There is no separate “viewer” version that could show something different. Turn sharing off any time to kill the link for everyone but you, or regenerate it to cut off people who had the old one.

Presenting on a projector or streaming to OBS? Open the wheel in stream mode for a clean, full-screen view with no site chrome around it. You can still trigger the spin from your dashboard on another screen or tab, which is what keeps you from visibly alt-tabbing mid-draw.

6. Let people enter themselves (optional)

If you do not want to type every name yourself, turn on public entries and share the join link instead. People submit their own name, a contact number and a proof screenshot if you ask for one. Nothing lands on the wheel until you review and approve it, so the list stays yours to curate.

Set an entry deadline and let the form close itself. This matters more than it sounds. The hardest moment to hold a deadline is when somebody messages you personally two minutes after it passed, and a form that has already closed takes that decision out of your hands. One quiet exception costs more goodwill than a hundred refusals.

7. Press spin

The winner is chosen on the server, not in anyone’s browser, using a cryptographic random source weighted by each slice. See the About page for exactly how that works. The result is written to your draw history before it is sent to any screen, which is the detail the whole fairness claim rests on: by the time any viewer could interfere, the outcome is already recorded.

Before a draw with anything at stake, publish the entry count. One number, posted in advance. It fixes the list in place and it is the cheapest credibility available. The rest of the process is in how to run a raffle people trust.

8. After the spin

Every draw is timestamped and listed on the wheel’s history, and spinning again does not overwrite it. If you have to redraw, whether for an ineligible winner or a connection drop, keep both results and say why. A history with an explained anomaly is credible; a history with a gap is not.

Then log what the winner actually received on the winners page, and publish the receipt if you want a public record. This is the step nearly everyone skips and the one that decides whether people enter your next draw, because the question in an audience’s mind is rarely “was it random?” and almost always “does this person pay out?”

Next

Advertisement