Show HN: A/Bingo for ASP.NET

I think a prominent client of mine may owe you a beer. Thanks for bringing the light of A/B testing to platforms without great options. Nobody should have to use Google Website Optimizer.

I guess this isn't totally off topic: http://www.fairtutor.com/about/how-it-works is broken unless that's part of the a/b test :)

Seriously, FairTutor is a great looking site, would love a post on how you built it, found the tutors, etc.

[EDIT] Just saw your reply to forcer's question. My page was stale [/EDIT]

That storing the participation data in the user's browser is a bit of a red herring for me. Would you please describe the tradeoffs between doing it that way, and doing it Patrick's way?

Also, there's no license. I potentially would like to contribute, but that's a show stopper. Any chance of giving it an MIT lic?

Feel free to shoot me an email at joshpearce[at]beechtreetech[dot]com

It uses cookies to store participation and conversion data, so as a visitor you'll come away with a cookie that looks like this:

  ab:ID=1212802769|Tests=header_caption,register_payment_message,account_instructions,setup_navigation|Conversions=header_caption

That way, we can simply ask the visitor whether he's participating in a given test, and we can know not to score him twice for anything. All that lives on the server is a file at the root called tests.ab holding a few k worth of participation and conversion tallies.

Every time anything changes, it checks to see if it's saved its state in the last minute, and if not it simply serializes itself to XML and dumps that to disk. If it ever finds itself uninitialized (such as on a server reset), it attempts to load its last saved state. So long as you remember to ignore that tests.ab file as part of your deploy, it'll survive intact.

As to selling it, I'm all about bringing in the cash, but a hosted option wouldn't really work for this. First, it's architected specifically so there's hardly anything to host. Second, its big advantage over something like Visual Website Optimizer is that your pages don't hang while requesting resources from a 3rd party.

Don't worry. I've got other stuff bringing in revenue (like the site this is hosted on, for instance), but thanks for the suggestion!

Are you pointing out a typo on the site (if so, I can't find it), or are you lamenting that it requires UserControls to work?

If it's the latter, read down to the next code sample, which shows how to call the library directly from an ASP.NET MVC View or anywhere else.

The UserControl is just there as a convenience.

Try a few of the links here:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/resources

Basically, it's testing one version of your website against another version, so that you can measure which one better compels users to do something.

So, for example, you might try testing your normal "Buy Now" button against a double-sized, bright red shiny button. You'd show one version to half your visitors, the other version to the other half. Libraries like this one let you keep track of who saw which version, and whether they actually bought your thing.

After a week or so collecting data, you can see that, for example, 4.8% of visitors seeing your old button clicked it, whereas 6.6% of those who saw the big red one clicked it. That's valuable. As in, measurable in dollars valuable, so you need to be doing it if you run a website that sells things to people or otherwise gets value out of people doing stuff on it.