A couple of handy new features for the Third-Party Draw Service
are now online. First, the Public
Records allow your entrants to view the results of all your drawings (except private ones). This makes life a lot
easier for your entrants.
Second, the cool new Draw Widget
allows you to publish the result of your drawings on
your own web pages, so your entrants don't have to leave your site
to convince themselves the drawings were conducted
in a fair and unbiased manner. You can create a widget for any drawing held with the Third-Party Draw Service, even
ones that you've held in the past. To create a widget for one of
your drawings, simply go to the Third-Party Draw Service and click on the
‘create widget’ link for the drawing you
want. The widget is currently in beta, so comments are extra
welcome.
Other additions include the reintroduction of the bit counter
(near the bottom of the main page), which shows how
many random bits RANDOM.ORG has generated all the way back since
October 1998 when it first went online. There's also a new Bit Tally page that shows the exact number of
bits (it's a lot!) and calculates the average speed of the generator.
Finally, the RANDOM.ORG web site is now running off a cloud hosting
company in the United States. Hopefully this should mean even better uptimes
and an extra performance boost, especially for US customers.
25 October 2009
The Trails feature of the Premium
Generator now also uses the time zone that you choose for your
account to print its timestamps.
A beta version of the new Public Pecords page is available to all
draw holders (make sure you are logged in to
try it out).
11 October 2009
The Third-Party Draw Service now has a
button to switch between the public view and the owner's view for
individual drawings. As a result, you no longer
need to logout to see your drawings the way your
entrants see them. The owner's view also contains a few new
features, such as a permalink (e.g., to post to your blog or web
site or just keep for your records) and share links to Facebook and
Twitter, so you can easily share the results of your drawings with your entrants.
It is now possible to set your own time zone in your RANDOM.ORG account. The time zone is used to display the completion time for
all your drawings. This makes it easier for your
entrants to see exactly when your drawings were
held. This functionality works for all your past drawings too.
The Third-Party Draw Service now has a nice
feature that allows owners of drawings to switch
between Owner's View (where all details for a given drawing are shown) and Public View (which is what
everyone else sees). Another new feature is direct links to Facebook and Twitter to make it easy to share the
results of your public and
entrant-accessible drawings.
A new style sheet now makes RANDOM.ORG look better on
smartphones, such as iPhones and Android phones.
The Random Web Redirector will redirect you
to a random generator on RANDOM.ORG. I'm thinking of offering
this service for people's own sites. If you would like to use this
service with your own site, let me know.
The Password Generator will generate
strong passwords, which do not contain characters that are easy to
get mixed up, e.g., ‘1’ (the digit one) and
‘l’ (lowercase L).
A new favicon
was added (check it out), which uses the
font in the new RANDOM.ORG logo (OCR-A), rather than the Courier
New font that was used in the old logo.
The RANDOM.ORG web server now redirects all traffic for http://random.org to http://www.random.org. This was done to
fix a problem that caused people to get warnings about the RANDOM.ORG certificate in certain situations.
2 May 2009
Video Tutorial #1 shows how to use
RANDOM.ORG to hold a promotional giveaway for your blog or
business.
20 April 2009
Big news! The Third-Party Draw Service is
now automatically included with any RANDOM.ORG Premium Account. See the Guide to Random Drawings
for details on how to use it. Tried and tested over two years by a
range of charities and PR companies, this is a truly professional
solution for holding independently verifiable random drawings with up to 2,000,000 entrants.
Other news: Due to popular demand, the Sequence Generator now supports multi-column
format.
9 February 2009
The Integer Widget Wizard is now online! You can use it to put widgets like the one below on your own web pages.
14 December 2008
New functionality:
You can now choose which currency you want to use for
invoices. Currently the following currencies are supported: AUD,
CAD, EUR, GBP, USD. If you have requests for other ones, email me.
It is now possible to add credit to your account balance, but
you can't actually use the credit for anything yet.
The account editing features can now also be used to change your login.
1 December 2008
This month's new functionality:
New account editing features that allow you to change your
password and email address for your Premium
Account, and which you can also use to recover lost
passwords.
A small formatting problem was fixed on the List Randomizer.
4 November 2008
Lots of behind-the-scenes server maintenance has been performed
over the past months, but there are also some visible improvements
to RANDOM.ORG:
The Possible Lessnesses site, based
on a work by Samuel Beckett, is now hosted at RANDOM.ORG.
Access is free but requires a password due to copyright
considerations. Email e@lessness.org
to get the password.
23 June 2008
The Premium Generator now supports email
notifications. This feature has been requested by many users,
especially players of strategy games.
10 June 2008: New services
A couple of great new additions:
The brand new Sound Generator allows
you to generate random sound samples. They may sound like radio
noise, but a spectrum analysis will
reveal that they have a much more uniform power level distribution
across the frequency range.
The new Calendar Date Generator
allows you to pick random dates within a specified interval and
subject to weekday constraints.
21 May 2008: New services
It has been a while since I've added new features, but here they finally are:
There is now a fancy Card
Shuffler, which will shuffle configurable decks of playing
cards and pick cards from them.
The shiny new Set Generator allows you to
generate multiple sets of random numbers at the same time.
There is now a Quota Check
function that can easily be used by automated clients to check
their current bit allowance.
All pages now contain a search box.
7 December 2007: Premium services
A couple of big changes this month:
The Premium Generator is now
officially open. It can be considered a flexible
alternative to the Sequence Generator
and Integer Generator, and it also features
very handy trails that can be used to
remember the last 10 times you used it. Trails are useful if you
need to pick a random number with someone who is in a different
location.
Registration for Premium Accounts is
now open, and payments are accepted via PayPal. At this point, an
account gives you full access to the Premium
Generator. In the future, other premium services will be made
available to RANDOM.ORG account holders.
To anyone who is curious, I am in the process of finalising
changes to the Third-Party Draw Service.
Please inquire if you
are impatient or if you're interested in getting access to a trial
account that will let you test drive this service.
Keno Quick Pick was added as distinct
from Lottery Quick Pick
because keno (as opposed to most lotteries) allows a variable
number of numbers to be played on each ticket.
A bug in my CSS style sheet was fixed that caused numbers
generated to be printed with a very small font in some
browsers.
11 June 2007: More minor updates
A few more changes:
Due to popular request, Lottery
Quick Pick now supports lotteries with multiple types of balls
(e.g., bonus balls).
The graphs for the current day are now generated every hour,
so you can monitor the progress of today's statistics.
The server was updated to Debian 4 (‘Etch’).
The server upgrade caused a bug to occur in the bitmap
generator; this has been fixed.
10 May 2007: Minor updates
Over the last month, the following changes have been made:
A broken parameter check in the coin flipper has been fixed,
which allowed someone to ask for a gazillion coins to be flipped.
Although this didn't break the server per se, flipping a
gazillion coins does use a lot of random numbers.
A bug in the timestamping has been fixed, causing the
timestamps printed on the pages to run behind by up to one
hour.
The server now uses pure GMT, i.e., Greenwich Mean Time
without adjustment for daylight savings time. I'm still
undecided whether it's easier for people in other time zones to
convert to/from pure GMT or Irish Summer Time (IST), which is
essentially just GMT with adjustment for daylight savings
time. If you have an opinion on this, drop me a line.
The multi-column format for the Integer
Generator has been reintroduced by popular request.
A bunch of US coins have been added to the coin flipper.
A list of peer-reviewed citations has been added to the Media and Citations page.
My homebrew log rotation program for the statistics logs has
been replaced with cronolog, which is actually a
much better solution.
8 April 2007: Minor updates
The new server is performing well and seems quite capable of
keeping up with demands. A couple of more features have been
added:
Support for SSL.
Several people reported they thought the new features on some
of the forms (e.g., the Integer
Generator) were a little confusing and cluttered the
interfaces. The features were important to some hardcore users
of RANDOM.ORG but not relevant for most people, so I have moved
them to an Advanced Mode on the respective forms, which I think
actually works much better.
A major change to the quota system that should allow much
better utilisation.
Miscellaneous bug fixes related mostly to differences in
JavaScript support between different browsers.
If you find bugs or have suggestions, let me know!
1 April 2007: New server goes online!
No, this is not an April's Fools joke... The new setup, which
has been in the works for a year and a half, is finally replacing
the old. This is a major overhaul of the software, so except for
the quality of the numbers (which remains exactly the same as the
old server), I'm expecting there may be a few inconveniences from
things breaking. However, I hope it will be worth it in the end.
The old server is still around at old.random.org for the moment, but
it's running at reduced speed (with only one radio), so I strongly
encourage you to use the new one.
Please send me any
feedback (good and bad) you have on the new setup!
Here is a partial list of new features:
The back-end has been completely rewritten to use the ALSA
audio libraries. The approach is completely the same as the old
server, though, and my tests show the numbers to be exactly the
same quality (i.e., as good) as the old.
A three-radio setup now offers a total generator capacity of
6,000 bits per second, which is over twice as fast as the old
setup.
The dynamic content has been nearly completely migrated from
CGI scripts to PHP. This makes it much easier for me to maintain
it, which means improvements will appear more frequently in the
future.
First steps towards migration towards much better statistics
based on the NIST test suite instead of the ent program. Check
out the fancy new graphs and the stats browser. (While I don't
have graphs for the whole NIST suite online yet, the numbers have
of course passed the whole suite, as described on the analysis page.)
Many of the interfaces now support pregenerated
randomizations, either generated on specific days in the past or
based on persistent identifiers. If you don't know what this
means, it is probably not relevant to you, and you can continue
using the service as always. You will find more details in the FAQ.
The draconian and erratic script that I used to ban clients
that didn't conform to the guidelines has been replaced with a
much superior quota system. You are
restricted to 1,000,000 free bits per day, but top-ups are free
for now. The much-ignored checkbuf script still exists (and
works) but isn't really important anymore.
New and better interfaces for
automatic clients. The old ones should be retained for now, but
may disappear in the future.