Viral List is now built into Contest Boost
Viral List came out in July 2013 and did one thing: it got your existing email subscribers to recruit more. You pasted in the form code from AWeber, MailChimp or whichever provider you used, the plugin wrapped it, and each subscriber was promised a bonus once they had referred a set number of people.
It leaned on the autoresponders of the day and on email templates we would not want to maintain now. When we rebuilt the giveaway plugin the referral mechanic was the part worth keeping, so it went into Contest Boost 2.0, the download on this page.
In Contest Boost an entrant leaves a name and email and is shown a personal link straight away, with Facebook, X, WhatsApp and email share buttons under it. Every friend who enters through that link earns the referrer the bonus entries you set per contest; the referral token sits in a cookie for 30 days, nobody can refer themselves because their email is already on the list, and one entry per email is enforced. A leaderboard shows the top referrers with names masked.
What it does not do is send email. Entries are stored and the link is shown on the page; to get entrants into your newsletter tool, hook the contest_boost_entered action. Giveaway rules differ by country, so publish your own terms on the contest page. No external service, nothing loaded from anywhere else.
