Apart from the above restrictions, anyone in the world is welcome to enter (unlike Camelot's real UK lottery !) and for free. The pre-requisite of a bank account for players (to allow winnings to be paid by cheque) no longer applies because winnings are now paid into an InterLotto gaming account instead.
You'll be glad to know that I've now automated that one manual step (in quite an elegant way I must say myself, but I'm not telling you how) and I also now backup the final entry log file to another location just in case I'm stupid enough to wreck the entries again ! All this should mean that the virtual lottery draw won't suffer the same fate in the future, although it's always susceptible to hard disk failure of course (oh no, I'm tempting fate again...).
Needless to say, the prophesised disk problems emerged (a full disk to be precise) and caused the cancellation of Virtual Lottery #41. A large slice of extra code has since been added to ensure that a full disk will not disrupt the updating of the virtual lottery entry log (an appropriate error message will be returned instead).
As usual, there is a maximum of one prize winner per draw and any payment disputes will be resolved by InterLotto. The winner of each draw will be e-mailed shortly after the draw with details of how to claim their prize. When the UK lottery midweek draw commenced on 5th February 1997, the virtual lottery prize was split into an average of 50 Swiss Francs for each draw (Wednesday and Saturday) instead of its previous weekly average of 100 Swiss Francs.