I’ve been doing secret Santa with my family the last few years, but the webapps we use are always so annoying to use. You get an email every time your giftee updates their list or answers a question, but you need to sign in to the ad-riddled platform to see what is going on. You can make a wishlist, but only through links to Amazon.
Isn’t there a better way?
I wrote one a while back in Python. It didn’t have the wishlist stuff, though a guy could add that too. I just gave it a list of names and email addresses, and a list of people to not match together (like spouses, for our situation), and the script assigned each person and emailed everyone to let them know who they got.
It also generated a file with the pairings, so if someone deleted their email I could resend it.
It’s been so long now, I don’t know where my script went, but honestly I bet ChatGPT could figure something like this out.