I’ve been doing secret Santa with my family the last few years, but the webapps we use are always so annoying to use. You get an email every time your giftee updates their list or answers a question, but you need to sign in to the ad-riddled platform to see what is going on. You can make a wishlist, but only through links to Amazon.
Isn’t there a better way?
Pick names out of a hat? Why does this need to be a computer program? It would be simple to create a webpage or app that randomises who sends who presents, I haven’t heard of one specifically but there is probably one that exists. If I could do backend coding, I could probably make one quite quickly.
Could probably pull it off with Google Sheets / Excel if they’re looking for a low effort, tech-involved solution.
Probably should just pull names out of a hat, but I imagine they want it to be a secret for them as well and don’t want to rely on in-person presence for the assignment process.
We’re not all near enough to pick from the same hat, don’t want one person to be outside of the secrecy bubble, and if I could ‘create a webapp’ or ‘do the backend’, I probably wouldn’t ask strangers on there internet for advice, but yeah I’m sure that’s true too.
I wrote one a while back in Python. It didn’t have the wishlist stuff, though a guy could add that too. I just gave it a list of names and email addresses, and a list of people to not match together (like spouses, for our situation), and the script assigned each person and emailed everyone to let them know who they got.
It also generated a file with the pairings, so if someone deleted their email I could resend it.
It’s been so long now, I don’t know where my script went, but honestly I bet ChatGPT could figure something like this out.
I can code and could almost certainly make it quickly. I’m between jobs and was looking for a side project anyway. Tell me how you want it to work and I’ll bang it out in a couple of days. Also gonna need some name ideas.
Since posting this I’ve come across www.secretsantagenerator.com , the most bare-bones and straight to the point version imaginable (holiday cheer definitely not included!), and exactly what I thought I was after. I’ve also remembered that one good feature of the terrible thing we used last year was being able to anonymously ask your giftee questions.
Seems like a good small coding project if you’re up to that
