Re: Random pictures - not twice

Without using cookies or session information, you're going to go through your picture list faster depending on how many users are accessing the random pic page. If you don't make it user-specific, then it doesn't really matter if you go through the images sequentially.. it may appear random on the user end because other users are going to be grabbing sequential pics as well. If you want to stir the waters a bit, you could run them sequentially but randomize the sequence. This is what some music playlist programs do when you randomize a playlist. Instead of pulling a random song from the list and risking playing the same song back to back, it just shuffles the playlist and plays it sequentially. When you get to the end of your randomized list, you can re-shuffle it and start over. This gives some semblance of randomness. If you want to make sure each image gets its fair amount of time in the spotlight, you could keep track of how many times each image has been displayed. Having a database table with a list of all the image names and their 'served' count would let you weight your list a bit to give preference to the images that havn't been displayed that often. And if you want to give each user the total package, you can keep track of how many times each image was served to a specific user and weight your shuffling that way. I'm sure there are other ways, but there are just a few that may be viable for you, depending on the level of randomness per user you need. Let us know what solution you come up with. I'm sure others have had similar questions and just havn't asked. -TG = = = Original message = = = Hi there! I have created a script the generates random pictures... <?php //Random pictures // $pictures[0] = "bil1.gif"; $pictures[1] = "bil2.gif"; $pictures[2] = "bil3.gif"; $pictures[3] = "bil4.gif"; for ($i=0;$i<3;$i++) $r = rand(0,3); ?> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;<img src="<?php echo $pictures[$r];?>"></p> <?php ?> With this above script the same picture can be shown twice. Is there any smart way of avoiding this without having to rely on cookies/sessionids? Best regards /Gustav Wiberg Stammis Internet - http://www.stammis.com/ - pedigrees on the net ___________________________________________________________ Sent by ePrompter, the premier email notification software. Free download at http://www.ePrompter.com.