New website, your opinions help

[daryl4356]

Hi there,

Just launched a new website, www.firsttothetreasure.com

Its an online treasure hunt which is based on a unique idea.. An Online Treasure Map.

I will sell the banners behind the treasure map to fund prizes and make it 100% free to enter! this will attract visitors on a daily basis, so i would have thought this would make it extremely popular.

what do you all think? you need to register to use it, but if you just want a look use the following; -

login - demo
Password - letmein

unlike all the other mass advertising sites I wont make money from this as the funds raised will go back into prizes, but i reckon should make a fun site! and probably become quite a good site to advertise on. It gives me as much advertising space as pixel sites, but selling full sized banners with no minimum amount needed!

So please give me some feedback and or help marketing etc if you feel it could be a good site.

Thanks
Daryl

[peterjhale]

neat idea

won't people just get fed up digging when they don't win anything ?

you need to have either low value prizes or money off or special offers or something - if there are 10,000 squares (guessing) and 5 prizes I don't think you'll get people coming back....but that's just me

[daryl4356]

Currently there are only 5 prizes, when it first launched there were £2000 worth, but some have been one.

the idea is each day there will be £2000 worth of prizes, hence selling the advertising and will have a few hundred on at a time. plus any that were not run the day before.

unil some adverts are sold there wont be a great deal of prizes on there but will always ensure there is atleast one. not by putting fake prizes but by putting up the cash.

hopefully I can get a bit of exposure and some takers for the adverts and it will not end up costing me a fortune (like it is already)

[fisicx]

It won't take long to write a script that selects each square and submits a 'digging' request. I reckon an automated script will take about 2 hours to check the whole map and win all the prizes.

But for those less clever, not knowing where has already been dug will put off a lot of treasure seekers.

But in any case, the home page is all about you and very, very boring. I don't care how much advertising space costs or how you want me to tell my friends. I want to see the map - and I don't know where it is, you have a link in the menu that says 'The Treasure Map' but that's it - where is the big bold banner that says 'Here be Treasure me Hearties - dig for gold and all for free'.

Spice it up and make is exciting 'cos I got bored waiting for the digging to finish.

A good idea that needs a lot more work to make viable. I wish you well.

[daryl4356]

Thanks too for your views.

I took into account the scripts people could write and what the site does is every hour it generates new pages and moves all the adverts and prizes around. I am hoping that will stop those that will attempt to track them down. the game is therefore more about chance than skill. I would not see someone sitting for hours clicking away but maybe a few minutes when they have nothing to do for work etc.

Daryl

[peterjhale]

trust me people will invest a script that queries your db every 2 milliseconds

[fisicx]

So basically, you are saying that the chances of winning a just a matter of luck - click on the right square and I get the prize.

I was going to play the game I would want to see the map getting dug up and my chances of winning increase - that way there is an incentive to play.

And the laborious way you promote the game and the very slow load times are going to drive away your customers.

[daryl4356]

no details regarding the prize codes are contained on a database. The code is contained within one of the pages and is emailed to claim the prize.
A seperate application checks this code contained in the email against an entry in a database (away from the webserver) and responds advising the prize is won and removes the prize page.

I was going to just have a simple text box to enter but I would be prone to too many scripts being submitted against it.

currently also the pages are labelled 1 - 10,000. I am working on changing this to random numbers between 1- 10,000,000 to further make it secure. as a programmer the creation of all the pages and the map is a simple application i write this is why I can re-generate them so easily.

of course if any of you still think this will not be a secure enough method please advise as I will need to re-think. I am sure somewhere someone will hack it (if it ever gets popular) and will have to have things in the terms to cancel these claims if they arrise

[fisicx]

Security aside,

What incentive is there for a visitor to play the game? At the moment it is all down to luck, and without knowing where has already been searched players will soon get bored.

Afterthought: who said the db is going to be accessed, all the script has to do is cycle through the co-ords, simulating a pointing device and wait for the 'you're a winner' message.

[daryl4356]

All your points are very valid and I really appreciate them because they are asking alot of questions about the process I have not thought about so that can only be good for me.

I think your right I should look to mark each attempted "dig" My only concern was making the game too easy, but thinking about it you would have to get through 10,000 trys to get the lot so it won't be that that easy.

With regard to the second point, as I have mentioned I will be looking to create 10,000 random pages numbered between 1.html and 10,000,000.html these will be the digging pages which will link to 10,000 random pages numbered between 1.html and 10,000,000.html which will be confirmation pages. by looking at the source of the treasure map, if I do not encrypt it, will this be possible if i encrypt every HTML page. doing that is a very simple step and surely that would make them unreadable by any script.

I may be wrong there but that was my understanding of HTML encryption.

They may be able to open each digging page but I would have thought would still need to scroll through them like anyone esle. I may be wrong here and pleae if any of you know otherwise please assist if you can.

But honestly thanks for all your input, It's been a great help and gives me plenty to do and look into to make any success I can from this

Daryl