Spot the Ball Competition/Online Competitions

[redbear]

I'm designing a website for a competition using XWD6 and the legal team involved are talking about making it something like an online 'Spot the Ball' competition as opposed to an entrant answering questions.

Has anyone ever done anything like this? I'm not sure where to start if they insist on heading down this route.

I'm not a programmer, just a simple web designer and it's my family and I who are offering the competition.

For those who don't know what Spot the Ball is, this is from wiki:

A spot the ball competition is a traditional newspaper promotion where the player has to guess the position of a ball which has been removed from a photograph of a ball sport, especially association football. The position of the ball must be deduced from the relative positions of the sportsmen shown in the photograph, the directions in which they are looking, etc.

Any and all sugggestions appreciated and if you've ran an online competition before I'd be interested to know what you did. Thanks!

[gwpriester]

How about a spot the lawyer contest? There is a photo of a dead snake and a dead lawyer in the the road. There are skid marks in front of the snake.

I have never seen one of these competitions but I guess the secret is finding a photo that 1) You can legally use and 2) That has a pretty strong indication of where the players are looking.

How does the contestant indicate where the ball is? Or is this what you are asking?

[steve.ledger]

Very common newspaper competition when I was in the UK. I think it was in the Sunday papers.
People would pay for entry and mark where they thought the ball was in red biro then post in their entry.
It's now a popular online gambling game which I believe is subject to gambling law.

[redbear]

How about a spot the lawyer contest? There is a photo of a dead snake and a dead lawyer in the the road. There are skid marks in front of the snake.

lol!

How does the contestant indicate where the ball is? Or is this what you are asking?

After I posted my request here I went back to searching on the internet and came across this site http://www.skillpix.com/competition/...gWejwISw%3d%3d. If you take a look, when the cursor's on the photo it changes to a sight finder and X and & Y co-ordinates are indicated.

I think it's close to what the lawyers are talking about and I will follow up with the web designer.

In our case though it will be something like 'Spot the Boule' - yep, there's a French connection!

[redbear]

Very common newspaper competition when I was in the UK. I think it was in the Sunday papers.
People would pay for entry and mark where they thought the ball was in red biro then post in their entry.
It's now a popular online gambling game which I believe is subject to gambling law.

You do have to be really careful with anything like this because like you said there could be implications with the UK Gambling Commission and you may need to be licensed to run it. However this is not always the case and one can run certain competitions without license (as per lawyers).

[pauland]

I work as a Flash developer and recently spoke with a company regarding a very similar development (that project didn't materialise for me though).

While the concept is relatively simple, great care must be taken that the software actually identifies a central pixel and that that pixel is clearly identified to the entrant. If money is changing hands, great care needs to be taken about the possibility of hacking the system to create free competition entries or fake an entry or the result.

The entrant deals with software on the browser, but you also need some software running on the server to save and protect the competition entries and ensure they are entries coming from the legitimate competition software.

A simple concept can get to be an expensive software proposition really fast (I didn't even mention secure servers). Of course, if money is not changing hands and the prize is relatively inexpensive then there's little incentive to hack the system for gain and a simpler solution will probably work.