Lottery Number Supplier

Should you wish to give us your feedback or would like to either extend
this plugin, or its later versions, then please forward your comments and suggestions to:
webmasterwordaster@gmail.com

Yes, sure. Result will vary depending on the combination of theme and browser that you happen to be using. To do your changes, navigate to your plugin’s directory at:

wordpress/wp-content/plugins/lotto-number-supplier/

Located under that directory is a folder “stylings”. You should find in it a css style sheet named “lns_pickformstyle.css”.

After you have made a backup copy of it, open this original copy with your editor and find the line with:

background-color:#F1F1F1

Change this to the colour you prefer, make any other changes you need and save the stylesheet.

With a few exceptions, such as this background colour, the style values for this plugin have been left at the default settings for the theme that is applicable. The one that was active when the snapshots shown below were taken, is the TwentyFourteen theme.

Yes, you can if your blog’s theme comes with a sidebar and you are willing to trade-off some of the form’s esthetics against a reduction in size. Also, you will need to accept being able to insert the plugin ONLY in the sidebar, as one CANNOT USE IT BOTH in the main body (i.e. pages and posts) AND in the sidebar of the same blog or site. It has to be only in the one or the other.

To do this select a text widget from the appearances’ panel of your administration dashboard then drag and drop it where you want this to appear in your blog’s sidebar. Next edit this to insert in the text the shortcode [lotsup]. When done, save and close the text widget. In the majority of cases that will be all you need do to cause a compacted version of the Lottery Number Supplier to appear automatically in the sidebar when you next view your site.

A best effort was made to fit the product to the most widely used default themes. But as already noted above, results may still vary depending on the particular combination of theme and browser that you happen to be using, so you might need to tweak the CSS styles. (Please see the earlier Q. and A. regarding appearance.)

The thinking behind this is that the attraction of benefitting from the use of this free “quick picker” would give the casual visitors to your site an incentive to make themselves known by registering with you, so as to then be able to log in and use this plugin.

What is more to the point is that it usually takes a real, live human to first register with a site before an ‘agent’ can log in.

This provides a valuable first line of defense against ‘bots’ and other ‘hit-n-run’ visitors who might be intent on doing mischief by abusing this plugin. (With regard to this last point, refer please also to the other questions here about performance and about the cycle-driven ‘pause’.)

However, if many of your site’s regular users insist on being able to use the plugin without having to first log in each time, it would be a simple enough matter to resolve. Just drop me a note at my contact address stating also your site’s URL. I will be happy then to reply you with an e-mail that describes what you will need to do in order to lift this restriction from your blog.

When planning and building this plugin, I needed to keep in proportion the extent of its complexity and the effort going into building it, with the size of the likely following that the lotteries involved enjoy. Moreover, had I addressed the local and regional lotteries as well, it would have made the plugin too unwieldy.

Because of this I am much to my regret obliged to keep within the scope of this plugin only the biggest lotteries that have a continental or multi-state coverage.

But if by any chance I missed any one of the major inter-state lotteries that you are keen on, you are welcome to drop me a note and I will try and make a plan for you.

The justification for having included this default behaviour with the plugin was to add a local buffering mechanism for helping prevent very large numbers of user picks flooding the server with an excessive amount of requests. (Some more is said in regard to this in the reply below to the question on performance.)

My understanding from informal surveys is that 70 percent of lottery consumers are estimated to habitually play nine or less rows of numbers at a time.

You can plan for this by supplying with your shortcode for the plugin an explicit value of 9 for its argument to override the default of 6 as follows:

[lotsup cycles=’9′]

The chances would be good then that the majority of your users will never even get to the point of being invited to take that interlude.

Let us also remember that this is after all about a kind of entertainment. And a twelve second period is slightly less long than an interval used to refill a cup of coffee, add cream and sugar, stir and take a first sip.

So you might be unduly concerned.

Most if not all the modern application and network servers in operation today do a good combined job of handling multiple concurrent transactions.

Moreover, as extra insurance I have built several measures into the plugin to help prevent such a situation as you describe from arising. Just to mention a few of these:

Only your authenticated users will be able to use the plugin, which should help keep away from your site pranksters and other mischief-makers.

Next, use was made also of AJAX in building this application. So no page reload should result from making with it a pick, as AJAX will handle asynchronously each such request and refresh only the single line that receives the row of lottery numbers sent in response by the backend process on the server.

If you have, as you say a large user base, you have in all likelihood already seen the merits of implementing a caching mechanism. The better ones among these readily accommodate the comparatively small overhead arising from the AJAX -managed traffic that will come from using this plugin.

Finally, a simple additional buffering mechanism is made available to you through the plugin shortcode’s ‘cycles’ argument.

One of the purposes of this argument is to help dampen the impact of any user who might be inclined to hit the pick button incessantly like a woodpecker. It does this by enabling a 12-second rest interval to be set after a given total of rounds picking, that you can regulate through the value you specify for this argument. (The default total that applies when you omit the cycles argument is 6 rounds.)

Its other purpose is to provide you a tool for helping you informally level across your users their demand for the plugin’s services, so that they can each get to have a fair turn at using the “quick picker”.

My recommendation is that after starting up the plugin, you gradually adjust the cycles argument to different values until you attain a situation that works well for you.