Raffle wheel

This page does not connect to Instagram

Saying that first, because it is the thing most people arriving here are looking for.

There is no comment import. Paste the entrants as a list — one per line — and draw from that. The reason is not laziness: pulling comments from someone else's post requires a reviewed and verified app under Meta's rules, and the tools that advertise it mostly show you a dead grey wheel until you have connected an account you probably do not have. A page that promises a connection it cannot deliver wastes more of your time than one that tells you to paste.

What makes a draw credible

Three things, and none of them is the randomness.

A witness. Draw it where people can see, or record it. A wheel that takes ten seconds is watchable in a way a generator is not.

A published list. People should be able to see who was in the draw before they see who won. Paste the entrants, screenshot the wheel, then spin.

A record afterwards. Every spin on this page is logged with the time it happened, and the log exports as CSV. That is the artefact you post when somebody asks whether the third winner was really drawn third.

The randomness matters too — this uses your browser's cryptographic generator and discards the biased tail rather than taking a remainder — but nobody has ever disputed a giveaway on the grounds of modulo bias. They dispute it because there was no record.

Several winners

Set how many winners you are drawing and the page counts your draws against it.

They come out one at a time, deliberately. A tool that prints five winners at once is faster and worse: the whole value of drawing in public is the pause between names, and a list that appears all at once looks like it was decided somewhere else.

After each draw, remove the winner and spin again so nobody wins twice.

The CSV

The export gives you two columns, the winner and the timestamp, in the order they were drawn.

It is written so that a name beginning with a formula character cannot execute when the file is opened — an entrant called =cmd is a real thing that happens, and a published winners list that runs code in the organiser's spreadsheet would be a genuinely bad day. Ordinary names are left exactly as they were typed, including commas and quotes.