Contest Site Settings
The site settings page is where you configure the site level settings of your contest.
You get to your Site Settings area from the top right hand corner where the cog symbol is.
Once selected the Site Settings will open the settings form.
General Settings
The general settings area is where the high level site naming, tages and timezone is set.
Site Name – This is the general site name for your contest. This is often used by search engines when your website page is indexed.
Site Decsripiton – This is the description for your contest site. Again this is used by search engines when your website in indexed.
Keywords – These are the search meta-tags you want search engines to use when indexing your contest site. They help with your search engine opitmisation so that people have a better chance of finding your site when they enter these keywords into the search engine.
Timezone – This setting is extremely important. This is the timezone in which your contest dates will be managed to. It is important to set this to the zone you wish you contest timelines to run to. This will ensure that the contest starts and ends when it is supposed to.
Default Contest Settings
The next section contains the default message to display for a contest url when it is offline or a template has not been activited for it.
The "Enable global site pages" is used to enable a global site landing page to access either multiple active or closed contests (offline contests are not accessible). This will then display the global themes and pages section in the right hand main menu.
The Default page selection box is the page to display when the domain url is accessed without a sub-folder.
Domains
The Domains section is for setting the sub-domain name for your contest website.
In order to setup you own domain select the “Add custom domain” option. This will allow you to enter your own domain.
There are three steps that need to be completed when adding a new sub-domain.
The first step is to enter the sub-domain name.
The sub-domain can be a sub-domain to your own company domain e.g. contest.<your company>.com
The next step is that the new contest sub-domain needs to configured to go to your contest servers.
To do this you need to contact your ISP and follow the instructions listed above.
You also need to purchase or access an SSL certificate so it can secure your site.
For more details on importing an SSL certificate please refer to the article: installing your own SSL certificate.
After making the above changes it will take a few hours to be implemented.
Once you have setup your alternative domain name you can set one of the domains as the primary.
You can then set the primary domain to be displayed in the URL window of the browser regardless on which domain name is used in the list by selecting the “Options” button.
Then turn the “Redirect secondary domains to primary domain” to on and save changes. Then any visits to any of the domains will be redirected
Email Configuration
The email configuration area is where you configure the email sending service that will send out all contest notifications.
There are three options which you can choose:
launchpad6 Standard - This is the inbuilt Launchpad6 email service which can send notifications. Note this service will send from a Launchpad6 domain and will not use custom domains even if one is set
Mailgun - This is a global mail sending service which can be used to send your emails. To use this you will send to setup a Mailgun account at : https://signup.mailgun.com/new/signup This service adds some advantages such as email tracking, high volume delivery, unsubscribe services and many more. You can also setup the email domain to use your custom contest domain. To find out more information about getting the mailgun api key and other details go to : https://help.mailgun.com/hc/en-us/sections/200484834-Sending-Email
SMTP - This allows you to use your own email service for sending out contest notifications. This allows you to use your own domain names. Note this method is not recommended for high volume contests as the SMTP protocol method is the for inefficient of the above sending methods.
Email/Domain Blocking
The email and domain blocking options allows you to block email addresses and IP address ranges from voting in your contest. By default Launchpad6 blocks many spam and temporary email services from being used for voting. However new services are popping up all the time so this option allows you to add your own IP addresses or email addresses or entire email domains from submitting votes.
To do this select the "Open Blocking Manager" option.
You will then have the option to either block individual email addresses or domains by selecting the "Add Email" button.
To block an IP address select the IP Address tab and select "Add IP" button.
Site Restriction
The site restriction area is used to apply blanket restrictions to the contest site for anyone who visits it from the general public
Site Offline Message – This will display the message you have configured into the HTML text editor instead of the standard contest page.This is typically used while the site is still under configuration. To enable turn on using the on/off selector.
Password to access the site – Is used to password protect the site for any public user.
List of referrers – This is a very handy feature where you can restrict what domains a user can come from in order to enter the site. This is typically used by organisations who only want their staff to enter or view a contest who are coming from their company domain.
IP Whitelisting – This feature will only allow visitors who are from a specific IP address or IP Address range to access the contest site.
Social Authentication
Social Authentication is used to capture more details about users who are registering to access the contest using one of their social accounts.
The Google authentication keys also allows you to integrate your ContestPad to YouTube for storing or referencing YouTube videos.
See following articles for more on social integration:
http://help.launchpad6.com/contestpad-knowledge-base/how-to-setup-facebook-to-login-or-register