I run giveaways on Reddit myself, and the tools most people use have problems you only notice when they cost someone a prize.

The biggest one: on popular giveaways, those tools quietly stop reading comments after a certain point. Say 5,000 people comment to enter, but the tool only reads the first 2,000. The other 3,000 were never in the draw at all. Nobody gets told, and the result still looks legit. FairGiveaway reads every single comment no matter how many there are, and it shows you exactly how many people made it into the draw, right on the post.

The other gaps: winners come out all at once, so there is no way to do 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes. And when a winner never replies or broke the rules, there is no way to replace just that one person.

So I built this to fix all of that. It runs entirely on Reddit, it passed Reddit's app review, and it is free. Below is exactly how it works, including the honest parts you should know before trusting it.

Entering is just commenting

An entry is a top level comment on the giveaway post. Replies to other comments do not count. That is it, nobody has to sign up for anything.

One person is one entry, always. If someone comments five times, their earliest comment counts and the rest change nothing. The person running the giveaway and AutoModerator can never enter.

Filters

When you set up a giveaway you can require a minimum account age and a minimum karma (post + comment karma combined). Anyone below your bar is filtered out before the draw.

If your giveaway needs entrants to say something specific, you can set up to 3 keywords. A comment only counts as an entry if it contains at least one of them. Whole words only, so the keyword "cat" will not match "category". People who skip the words never make it into the pool, no more excluding them by hand.

One honest detail: every check happens at the moment entries are frozen, not when someone comments. The app reads comments during the freeze and stores nothing from them.

The freeze

When your entry window closes, you freeze. The app then reads every single top level comment on the post. There is no comment cap. If the thread cannot be fully read for some reason, the app refuses to lock a partial list and tells you to try again, it never quietly drops anyone.

After the freeze the entry pool is sealed. Nothing can be added or removed, and there is no undo. The post shows how many eligible entrants made it in.

The draw

This is the part the whole app is built around.

At the moment of the freeze, the app generates a secret random number on Reddit's servers and locks it in. Every winner is completely determined by that number. That means that after the freeze, nobody can influence who comes up. Not the host, not an entrant, and not me.

You can run the draw two ways. Ranked mode draws 1st place, then 2nd, then 3rd, one at a time, for when prizes are different. Equal mode draws all winners in one go, for when everyone gets the same thing.

Replacing a winner

If a winner never responds, declines, or turns out to be ineligible, you can replace just that one spot. The rest of the winners are not touched.

Every winner spot comes with 2 instant replacements, so a rule breaker or a no-show can be swapped out right away. After those 2, further replacements of that same spot wait 24 hours between them. When you replace someone you pick a reason, and you can add a short note. The old name stays visible in the results, struck through with the reason next to it. Nobody quietly disappears.

Everything is written down

Every giveaway has a public record on the results post. Anyone can open it. It logs the creation, the freeze with the entrant count and the exact rules that were applied, keywords, account age and karma, every draw, every replacement with its reason, and the finalize. Timestamps show in your own time zone.

The record is written as things happen, oldest first, and in-app actions can never edit it. When the host finalizes, the whole thing locks permanently. No more draws, no more replacements, done.

Things you should know

I want this app to be trusted, so here are the honest bits too.

• The app never messages winners. The host announces or contacts winners themselves.
• Entrants do not get a confirmation. Entering is just commenting, and the app does not show an entrant list.
• The fairness math behind the draw is real, but right now you cannot check it yourself from the outside. A public verification tool is what I want to build next.

Every timer in the app

• 24 hours: every winner spot has 2 instant replacements. Further replacements of that spot wait 24 hours between them.
• 30 days: a giveaway left untouched for 30 days after drawing began finishes automatically, as it stands. Every draw or replacement resets this clock.
• 24 hours: each account can start one giveaway per 24 hours through the hub. A rejected link never uses up your one.
• 24 hours: for mods setting up through their own sub, an unfinished setup that sits untouched for a day cleans itself up automatically.

How to run one

Two ways.

If you just want to run a giveaway: open the pinned hub post right here on r/FairGiveaway, paste the link to your own post, set your filters, and go. It has to be a post you wrote, and each account can start one giveaway per day. The results post appears here on this sub.

If you mod a subreddit: install the app on your sub from the directory, and you can run giveaways straight from your own posts' menus, with results posted right there in your community.

App directory page: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/fairgiveaway

It is free, there is no catch, I built it because I needed it. If something is confusing or broken, comment here or message me. I read everything.

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