Site that matches people (like secret santa)

November 5, 2015 1:53 PM

I'm helping in the planning stages of a swap(s) (it's for a quilt guild) and I'm trying to find a site that will help with the matching of pairs, kinda like the secret santa thing Metafilter and Reddit does. Prerequisites after the break.

1. Secrecy might be useful but needs to be optional.
2. Since some of the swaps might be between guilds (and number of members vary) it would be nice if it used some factors to match pairs. Example: when signing up if the users put in how many members a guild has so they're matched with a guild of a similar size.
3. Free would be great but not a deal breaker.

The secret santa sites that came up in a search of AskMeFi aren't exactly what I'm looking for but I guess I could get them to work if there's nothing better.

thanks in advance!

posted by pibeandres to Technology (5 answers total)

I think Elfster would work for something like this.
posted by QueenHawkeye at 2:23 PM on November 5, 2015

We've used www.drawnames.com for the past 2 years for Secret Santa. Worked great for us and was easy enough for our parents to use.
posted by Karotz at 2:55 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

We've used drawnames and never had a problem. It even has a way to include wishlists or interests. Someone else set it up though, so I don't know how customizable the pairing is.
posted by irisclara at 3:20 PM on November 5, 2015

My family has used drawnames.com as well and it's worked for our purposes, but it doesn't allow you to customize the pairings beyond excluding certain matches (e.g. the person you drew last year), so I'm not sure how well it would work for what you're trying to do. It's an extremely simple, user-friendly setup, though.
posted by josyphine at 7:14 PM on November 5, 2015

Best answer: With the caveat that I haven't used it in a few years, swap-bot is what we used for a Flickr swap group I used to belong to and it was great. (And still free.) I have no idea if it's like the imperfect Secret Santa sites you mentioned, though.
posted by Room 641-A at 8:48 AM on November 6, 2015