Bananalotto, win money for free (bananalotto.co.uk)

Member Name: julwhite

Product:	bananalotto.co.uk
Date:	06/04/08 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Chance of winning prizes

Disadvantages: Tries to open up pop-ups continually, small chance of winning the big prize

This is a review for the web-site www.bananalotto.com, which is also available at www.bananalotto.co.uk. I don't normally use sites such as these, but I remember first using it in 2001 and so remembered its name and thought I'd have a look to see if the site was still around.

Back seven years ago, this was an enormously popular site, you could have a chance of playing their free lottery to win 100,000 pounds, and you could enter once each day. The concept was clever, you would only be able to enter by clicking on an advertiser's link, so they could fund the lottery prizes using the advertiser's revenue.

The site is still present today, and is split into a few more sections, Bananascratch, bananagames, bananabingo, etc, although most of these appear to be pay sites, so you can choose for playing for fun and not winning any money, or paying money on your credit or debit card and then having a go.

For the sake of this review, I'm just going to comment on my thoughts of the main part of the site, which is the lottery section where you can win up to 100,000 pounds.

The process is relatively straight forward, you sign up at a registration screen and provide the usual information required, your name, address, e-mail, user-name and password and the like. They then send a confirmation e-mail to check that the e-mail is valid.

The site claims that the drawing of the lottery numbers is run independently by a European independent agent, and I have no reason to doubt that the site is run honestly in that regard.

In this lottery you have to select six numbers plus a bonus ball, and you win 10,000 pounds if you select all six numbers, and then the main prize of 100,000 pounds if you get the bonus ball as well. The site states that four people have won the big prize, I assume, they mean since the site opened in 2001.

So, on the positive side, you can enter a free game and get a chance of winning 100,000 pounds. It costs nothing, so it would be tempting to write a nice review. But this site has some serious problems in my view.

Firstly, if only four people have won the prize in eight years, at one win every two years, it is next to statistically impossible to win the main prize. So if you want some fun playing a free lottery and checking your numbers at 5.30pm each day, then it can't do any harm.

Secondly, most seriously, the site is obsessed with pop-up screens opening on nearly every page you access. The site crashed Firefox, so I tried it again in Internet Explorer, and it opened 18 new windows. I can't see any excuse for that, I can understand opening a page to see an ad which pays for the site, but continually sending browser requests to open up new windows is in my view very poor.

Thirdly, after playing the lottery section of the site, you can also play a free scratchcard game. This is done by holding down the left mouse button and rubbing out a picture on the screen to see what you uncover. In my case, I didn't uncover anything, on both Firefox and Internet Explorer, the site wasn't functioning, with parts of the image not loading. Others might be more successful, but certainly it wasn't my day!

I noticed from some other reviews that the biggest two prizes that are won are free weekends to Fitness First and vouchers for CD-WOW. This sounds very impressive, but I know as a member of Fitness First that you can get a free weekend anyway just by asking to trial the club, and the vouchers for CD-WOW aren't like Amazon gift vouchers, they're just discount vouchers. So, not the most exciting of possible prizes to win.

I decided after trying this to just unsubscribe so that I wouldn't receive any future correspondence. There are quite clear links to this and it's easy to do. It's not clear how successful I've been though as when I pressed the unsubscribe button, it just took me back to the main page and tried to open up more pop-up windows.

It's a shame that what was initially a really good concept has for me gone a little sour. It would be nice to see this site going back to the basic concept it once was, giving people the chance to win money in exchange for looking at some ads. Now the site is clumsy, irritating and seemingly determined to force open windows trying to sell you other, mostly gambling, products.

The problem with this site, for me at least, is that I don't trust it, it's hard to believe you can really win a big prize when the site is determined to force open more and more windows trying to sell products. But if any readers reading this have won prizes, then well done!

Summary: Not what it was a few years ago, a very frustrating site now