User Guide
Paste your list
One entry per line — names, usernames, ticket numbers, ideas, restaurants. Pasting straight from a spreadsheet column or a comment export works, since each row arrives on its own line already.
Choose how many to pick
Set the number of entries to draw. One for a single winner, or several for a set of prizes, a team, or a shortlist.
Decide about repeats
No repeats guarantees each entry can be drawn only once, which is what a giveaway with several distinct prizes needs. Turning it off lets the same entry come up more than once, which is occasionally what you want — assigning tasks where one person can take two, for instance.
Pick
Press the button and the selection appears. Press again for a completely fresh draw from the same list, which is worth doing before you announce anything — once a name is public, re-drawing looks like you did not like the answer.
About the Random Picker
Point it at a list and it chooses without favour. That sounds trivial until the selection involves someone with a stake in the outcome, at which point the method has to be visibly impartial as well as actually impartial.
How the selection is made
Your pasted list is split on line breaks into an array, then shuffled using a Fisher–Yates shuffle — walking backwards through the array and swapping each item with a randomly chosen earlier one. In a single pass that produces a genuinely uniform permutation, where every possible ordering is equally likely. The winners are then simply the first entries of the shuffled list.
The naive alternative — repeatedly picking a random index and re-picking when it has already come up — produces the same result but degrades badly as the pool empties, and a surprising number of implementations get its edge cases wrong. Shuffling once avoids all of it.
What the tool cannot know
Every line is treated as a valid entry. It has no way to tell that two lines are the same person spelled differently, that a heading row is not a participant, or that a trailing blank line is an accident. A duplicated name genuinely has two chances of winning, which is a real fairness problem that looks like nothing on screen. Two minutes spent deduplicating and trimming the paste is the difference between a fair draw and one that merely appeared to be.
Why running it live matters
The most valuable property here is not the quality of the randomness — it is that the draw can be performed in front of people. A result announced from a private draw always leaves room for doubt, however sound the method. A result everyone watched appear does not, and no explanation afterwards is as convincing as that.
Where it runs
Entirely in your browser. The list never leaves your device, which matters because entry lists are usually real names, handles or email addresses — personal data that should not be handed to a website merely to shuffle it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it remove duplicate entries automatically?
No. Every line counts as its own entry, so a name appearing twice has two chances. Remove duplicates before drawing unless the repeats are deliberate.
What is the difference between this and the Random Number Generator?
This picks from a list of things you supply. The number generator produces numbers within a range. If your entries are numbered sequentially, either works; if they are names, use this one.
Can I draw several winners at once?
Yes. Set how many to pick, and with No repeats on you will get that many different entries in a single draw.
Is my list of names uploaded?
No. Everything happens in your browser, which matters when the list contains real names or contact details.
How long can the list be?
There is no fixed limit. Very long lists are limited only by what your browser can hold, which is far more than a practical giveaway would ever need.
Can I prove the draw was fair?
Run it live on a shared screen or a recorded call. Anyone watching the result appear needs no further assurance, which is more convincing than any explanation of the method.