Help and Frequently Asked Questions

Privacy

• What do you do with the data you collect?

  Short answer: Nothing 😚

  Detailed answer: We receive only the data mandatory to start the Secret Santa: the list of users and usergroups in your organization. Everything will be forgotten automatically after you finished the draw! In fact, we do not even have a database 😮

• How long do you keep the collected data?

  This project do not use a database. Every data is stored only during the time of your session and will be deleted a few hours after your last interaction with the application.

Using the app

• How does it work?

  Once authenticated with your favorite Chat tool, you will be prompted with the User Selection screen.
  We show you all the users in your team. Just select the ones which will take part to your Secret Santa by clicking on their names.
  

  

  On the second screen, you will be able to customize a bit the message that will be sent to every participant. You can add an optional message that will be sent along the Secret Santa draw. You can even add details about every participant to help Santas achieve their mission.

  

  You can always preview the private message that will be sent with the following button, that will send you and only you a fake message:

  Send me a fake message

  Once you are ready, you can submit the Secret Santa by clicking this big red button:

  Shuffle and send Secret Santa messages!

  This will trigger the following operations:

  1. Shuffle all the users;
  2. Assign a random user to each user, without collision;
  3. Send a private message to each user with the user they must gift and your admin message;
  4. Send a private message to the admin (you) with details.

  And that's it, you are done!

• How can I retrieve the secret repartition ?

  As the organizer of the Secret Santa, you will receive a private message that will look like this :

  

  From there, you can click on "this page" in the message, which will take you to a page where you can paste the long code to receive the secret repartition.

• Can I add a custom message for some members ?

  Yes! If you need to specify some information for some users in particular (e.g: allergies, address), you can easily do so!
  On the customization step, you will see a list of all the participants, and each of them will have a field next to their name where you can enter the information :

  

  The note you write for each member will only be seen by their secret santa.

• Will the app work with an odd number of participant?

  Don't worry! The draw works perfectly no matter how many participants you selected (of course we need a minimum of 2 participants 😉).

• Can I make sure someone will be matched or not matched with someone else?

  No, the association is purely random, so you cannot do that with our application. An alternative could be to launch 2 Secret Santa with two groups of people.

• Can I add a new participant once messages have been sent?

  No, you can't. However, you can still start a new Secret Santa. We advise you to add a note in the message mentioning that this new draw cancels and replaces the old one.

• Will the app work with team larger than 500 people?

  The first step in our application is to retrieve all the users on your Slack workspace / Discord server - yes we retrieve all the users to allow you to select the ones that will participate in your Secret Santa.

  When your team is massive, Slack or Discord API can fail to send us all the users in a reasonable duration. That means you will not be able to start a Secret Santa. A possible workaround would be to create a new Slack workspace / Discord server / with only the participants.

  The second step is to dispatch a private message to all the selected users. Even if you started a Secret Santa with a lot of participants, the application will send all the messages progressively. So there should not be any problem at this step.

Discord

• Why is the bot always offline?

  The bot is only there to send private message to each participant. You won't interact with it directly, so it's always offline.

  To start a new Secret Santa in a Discord server, just go on the homepage, click on "Run on Discord" button, and follow the different steps.

• What to do when a user does not allow to receive private message on a Discord server?

  Discord has an option to allow someone to not receive private message on a their server they belong to.

  If you throw a Secret Santa in a server where a user does not allow to receive private message, Discord will prevent us to send them a message. So if you hit this error, you need to ask them to change their privacy settings on this server. See the example below:

  

  Once they made the change, you can safely retry to send the remaining messages. When the draw is finished, they can of course re-disable this setting as they wish.

• Why did someone receive @invalid-user as the person to gift?

  This is due to a known bug of the Discord Android application. The workaround is to open the conversation on the Discord desktop app (for Windows, MacOS or Linux) or on the website.

Webex

• What kind of Webex account is needed?

  The Webex by Cisco integration requires a Free or Paid Webex account.

• How to add the Webex integration?

  Head over our dedicated Webex tutorial to learn more about adding Secret Santa on Webex.

• How do I revoke the permission I gave?

  We are not storing any token or permission - so consider your Webex account already free from all ties with Secret Santa.

  Once used, this application will never send you or your contact any message anymore - it can only do that if you restart the app.

Miscellaneous

• How can I add my company / organization to your Hall of Fame?

  Simply drop us an email at hello@secret-santa.team with the name, url and logo of the entity you want to add. It's free but if you want to tweet or share our app to the world, you are more than welcome.