The symptom: You may have seen messages from various authors on various forums that questions seem to be taking a long time before they get rated and released, causing a bit of frustration among the authors.

The cause: we are getting more good questions submitted than ever (a very good thing!) but on the other hand, there has been a slight decline in New Question Game play (not that good). Both combine to a backlog slowly building up. The number of plays required for a question to make it through the game has already been decreased, but this is not enough.

The cure: if you're not already doing so anyway, please give our authors the two minutes of your daily time to play and rate their works in the New Question Game. If we just get 10% more players, we should start seeing that backlog clear out quite well (and you will benefit from having had a chance to memorize those new questions before you see them in an hourly on top of gaining some decent points).

Thanks!

Wes

People respond well to incentives. How about adding more challenges related to the New Question Game?

That would be something only Terry can do. I don't have that power - I can only encourage and motivate. (But then there is an inherent incentive - everyone gets their questions through faster!)

Terry, in case you are listening and need an idea:

New Question Power (Full badge / Ruby)

Score 500 or more points in the New Question Game 100 times. Only days on which you rate at least 8 questions afterwards count towards this badge.

Nice idea Wes!

Is there any way of telling what percentage of players who log in on a particular day play the new question game? If it's already 80%, another 10% might be tough. I suspect that percentage is much lower than 80 though.

We have about 700-800 players per day and the peak number of players online at one time is about ten times that number. The daily total would of course be even higher!

Many times the questions can be insanely obscure. That zaps a lot of the fun out of it. I still play due to the team aspect to the game, but that's pretty much the only reason why.

WesleyCrusher,
Do you have a breakdown on the percentage that take the quiz (all thusly contributing to the % correct figure assigned to a Q&A) and then fail to rate the Qs (impacting the good/bad value)?

If we read backwards on an authors accepted/rated page it says xxx rated the Q, yy% correct and z.zz good/bad. It could be inferred that only those who rated the Q are counted toward the % correct, but I'm guessing it is all who took the Q, whether rated or not, get included in that figure. IOW, the inferred is that the z.zz figure comes from all of the xxx number. That would exclude those who took the Q but didn't submit a rating for the five measely points you get for each evaluation. Raise those points earned for rating a Q and more may visit the game and lend an evaluation. Then set a badge target based on earning those evaluation points (like whozzits: ratits), not on how many they got correct without offering a rating.

Another suggestion for Terry: Please add this game to the Games dropdown at the top of the page.
All the other daily games can be accessed from the dropdown, but the New Question Game is only on the home page. A lot of days I forget to play this one because I'm going to the games dropdown and not always going to the home page. (I've gotten better at remembering since I have a question approved that isn't in the game yet.)

I play the new question game every day. It's a game I enjoy.

If the number of new writers keeps going up you could have a structural problem on your hand that might not be solved by a couple of new players. Wouldn't it be possible to extend the number of questions from 10 to 15? Or another idea: give people the possibility to play twice every day (like the GC). I also second Julia's idea about the dropdown.

If players aren't rating because they don't think the tenth of a second it takes is worth it for five points, they won't rate for fifty points either. Anyway, do we want the opinions of those who only rate because of the points?

There, I have just played it for the first time.

Maybe something as simple as a cumulative scoreboard for the top 100 people rating the most questions would work.

Also, I see we have a lot more submissions now, so I can lower the time that a question is in the game rotation so that we go through questions faster. I increased the time 6 months ago since we were dropping low on new qns, but things seemed to have moved in the opposite direction since.

My sentiments exactly, agony. I couldn't have said it any better.

Fifty points for taking and rating a quiz is way out of proportion to the points that can be earned in other games. People do care about two things here it seems: Points and Badges. Granting a badge for being part of expanding the Q dB seems appropriate. There are two to be earned on the writer side of the equation. Put one on the taker/rater side and I'm sure more will play and rate.

Instead of adding points, couldn't you just make the daily team points (the only reason I play) contingent on ratings? In other words, to have a score count, ratings must be completed.

Here's an example of the crazy obscurity some of these questions have.

6. With the withdrawal of the last coalition combat troops from Iraq on December 15, 2011, how many US Medal of Honor recipients were there during the 8 year 9 month conflict?

4
1
2
5

I have NO idea how anybody is supposed to know that.

The NQG rules said it was to be expected that 80% should be able to answer the question. In many tough questions, like that one, the answers are often set to lead to the correct response, getting correct replies in that ballpark and thus you learn. But when no clues to the answer are given, that is too obscure a question. More like 2% would know the answer meaning a 25% correct result would have been purely from guessing.
The Question is time dependent also. Some injured combatants may yet receive the award even after the Coalition has left the battlefield. It is disrespectful to only expect that the question only pertains to those given by the withdrawal date. That number is not tracked (only the total is) What is tracked are the total attributable to the conflict as a whole. And as of now, that number may change.

And that question exemplifies my issue with many of the questions, which is not enough information given. Does the question mean the people who won the Medal of Honor for their service during the conflict, or since the specific time period was mentioned, would it also include Tibor Rubin, who won the award in 2005, but was actually a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Korean War. Answers fitting both possibilities are there as choices.

I received this question too and frankly, found it a bad question, but then you mark it as such, and if there's an ambiguity, then submit a correction note. To play 10 questions once a day isn't really a lot to ask but it makes such a difference to the time it takes to have questions rated by the game.

Hi Wesley,

Your request has not fallen on deaf ears. I am one of the people that stopped playing the New Question Game. I'm not really sure why, but I will play it everyday from now on, and I'll post this on my team's message board, and encourage my teammates to begin playing, if they aren't already. Hope this helps.

Dawn

I agree with Julia103 that the site navigation is inconsistent -- a few games are unavailable from the menus. In particular:

1) The New Question Game
2) My Daily Quiz
3) The 195 Day Bus Ride

All of these should be available from a dropdown menu somehow.

Yes, as reeshy says - mark those poor questions as "poor", and send corrections if you find something wrong.

Maybe something like another Champion Badge? That would give a long term goal and incentive to keep players playing over the long term. Just a thought!

Please add the Mind Melt to that list...nice to have them all in both places.

It's located below the Daily Game on the pulldown menu.

I play New Questions every day and the difficulty varies, one day I'll be asked about things I've never watched, read, or listened to. Then the next day it will be more general and easier questions. I usually rate Average, but I will rate Excellent or Poor if I think it deserves that rating.

Did somebody mention new badges? That will drive participation up!

Oh and P.S. while Mind Melt is brought up, should the NEW button on the homepage beside Mind Melt be removed, there are players who have played the game 750 times!

Oooooh a new badge - I love getting new badges. They're just like new shoes.

I love getting badges too but I don't want to see people getting badges just for rating questions - there is the danger that there are those people who will just rush through and mark them all average without even really reading them just to get the badge.

The authours spend time and effort writing these questions and they deserve them to be rated properly. (Or don't spend much time and effort and don't deserve an average!)

Maybe something to encourage people to play the game more frequantly (and hope that they will automatically rate them fairly after) rather than the emphasis on ratings.

I agree with Midget40 - I wouldn't like to see a badge solely for rating, but wouldn't be averse to one that encourages participation, but then it must be considered that if rating isn't necessary for a new badge, then many players just won't bother.

There already is a badge awarded for rating. It is the Rating Badge. It is awarded for rating (after playing) 500 quizzes. If there, shouldn't single questions get similar treatment? 500 quizzes is around 5000 questions. But since the quizzes can be taken in multiple chunks each day, That quiz rater badge can be given in the couple of months taking them time frame. A similar time frame on single questions (since we can only do 10/day) would be at around 600 questions (60 days x 10/day).
If the speed raters are in it for just the badge they'd most likely stop doing unthinking ratings once they have the badge. Every Question presented in that time frame would have the same amount of that against them so it would all average out in time.

The Rating badge is also only for gold members, as regular members cannot play more than 100 quizzes. The New Question Game can be played by anyone, and a lot (but by no means all) of those non-golds may rate a question poorly just for the sake of obtaining a badge.

I don't think rating alone should do the trick - I just think it should be another prerequisite to the badge that you don't skip that step. That's why I suggested the version based on a moderate score (that at least requires trying) and then rating.

So, a badge seems warranted. And, as Dave says, its issuance should show some responsibility to the site, which paying members are want to do, implying it should be a gold member badge.

The submission of new questions is available to all members, as is the playing of the New Question game. I think that should a badge be awarded, then it should be available to all, and not just gold members! That would be like saying 'We want your questions, but you aint getting a rating badge'. That's just 'not cricket'!

Is a breakdown on membership status of NQG submitters available? Then there's the aspect of some who were gold when submitted but were regular when the Q was rated and vice versa. Judging from the presence of avatars on the "Thank you for rating and thank these folk for submitting the Qs" page, it used to be almost all Golds doing the submissions but lately it's getting near to fifty-fifty with the edge to the golds (and some golds keep a bag as an avatar which shows as a regular/no avatar on that page).

edit: Going by the accepted Q towards the QQ badges list, it is easily 2/3rds gold doing the submissions and again the non golds are some lapsed golds and some who will be golds.

Any badge that we make with the express purpose to increase NQG participation would obviously have to be for all members. Restricting it to Golds (and thus not extending the extra motivation to the regulars) would undermine the very reason to make it in the first place!

Not sayin ye nor nay on that, but I would like to clarify an earlier presentaion in a post that there is a badge already for golds in the game (heck I'll even grant that it's an open badge but it was stated there's only one). But here's the state of the game regarding badges. There are three available. Open to all. They are for 50 accepted Qs, 50 scored/rated highly Qs and for 100 scored rated highly Qs. Why can't one be for gold members? We're doing most of the writing and ranking.

Edit: Wesley, you stated there were 700 playing the game each day? How many are golds? How many ranking inputs are generated each day? I'll wager a thousand angstroms that the number of golds is close to the number of rankings each day. In light of three badges already for anybody, I think the number of rankings being performed would increase with a gold badge offered. Heck, it might lead to a few new memberships.

Edit 2: Think of the Qs as Guild constitution/contract items or amendments. Anyone can write one, even non guild members. It goes to committee for a decision on merit (editors). If accepted, it then goes before the whole guild (in this case the paid membership edit: okay and some temporary visitors allowed to take part) for ratification. Why not give those guild members a token to show they voted? It doesn't go to the general public to decide what the guild should contain (and is accepted ultimately with the King's permission, of course).

I think some sort of incentive may be needed, as others have suggested.

I must admit that I haven't been as good about playing this recently. And I think the reason is that it actually takes quite a long time to go through the process of rating each question.

To do it properly, you do need to re-read each one, think about its difficulty, interest, quality of writing, whether the interesting information is interesting and/or helpful, whether you have seen the question before...and any other factors specific to the question. And by the time you have done this for each question, it feels like a lot of work.

OK, you only have to do it once a day, and out of the total amount of time our regular players spend on FT it isn't very much, but it still feels like a bit more effort than is justified by what you get out of it.

Does anyone else feel the same, or similar?

Yes, stedman.

If I don't feel I can be objective; I don't rate. It goes for quizzes as well. There's a fine line between good, bad and average, but I do use all 3 of them. There are questions you ask like... "This is interesting, but it's way too obscure" or "I like the rest of the question, but the answer choices were too close".. and so on. Sometimes I don't have the mental focus to be asking all of those questions or read properly, so I don't rate then.

I don't know about a badge. It will give you the quantity... but at the cost of quality ratings. I think. Points don't motivate me, but perhaps incrementing the points might motivate others.

Yes, adding a new badge would solve the problem... For a month of so. Then all the powerhouse players will again drop the game and never return until a new badge is available to them.



4. If you don't know the answer, and the answers are all numbers, always choose the second highest number. It is almost always the correct answer.


Of course, upon research, I have discovered that is incorrect. Sigh. The answer is either 1 or 2. I do not know the exact number (as mentioned, how would you?), but I did find research that during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only 10 members were given the medal, 3 of which were alive upon receiving it. So it stands to reason that there couldn't be 4 there during the withdrawal of the last coalition.... It has to be 1 or 2.

In any case, I completely agree that this question is far too difficult and should not be in the game. Sigh. Even Google couldn't find the answer.


Also, I, too would like to tell Wesley that his post has made me decide to start playing the game as often as I can. As soon as I finish checking the forums, I will go play the new question game. I am also on the authoring end, and I realize there is a need for more players. I had two questions submitted and waiting for what seemed like an eternity (it seemed so long because I only needed one more to be rated for a badge, and two were in the line for months...)

I will begin playing the game as often as possible.


The game also used to run every 6 hours, because we had so many submissions... Maybe we could put it on the same rotation as Global Challenge for a while; two games a day, 12 hours each? Twice as many players (the regulars would surely play both games a day) would rid us of that nasty queue quite quickly. Part of the reason I do not often write the questions is due to the long queue, so this would be greatly appreciated.

Actually, Salami, I think you were more or less right. I believe there were four given for service in the Iraq War. So, if that is really what the question asked, your system worked. The dicey part is in the wording of the question. Because more awards were given during that time period, just not for service in Iraq.

I think the number of awards GIVEN was not what was being asked... But how many were present at that particular ceremony on December 15. Since most who receive the medal of honor were not alive, they were therefore not present. Since only 3 were actually still alive, there could not possibly have been 4 present.

I think this is definitely a question deserving a correction note, should we ever come across it again. We are all clearly reading it in completely different ways.... And no matter which way we read it in, it is an impossible question that is unanswerable.

Or implement those bronze/silver/gold upgrades and have something that the powerhouses can spend years on without a level inflation issue - most of them are doing it for the shinies, not the three-digit number

I will ask this again, why not just make the ratings a requirement for your score counting? No badge needed, and if you want the team points, you will rate the questions.

Being forced to rate would probably only decrease participation among those who already play. Remember that NQG gets two numbers - goodness and difficulty and those who don't rate still contribute to difficulty scores. By forcing them, we'd lose those.

Don't force but provide incentives

Regarding the question about Medals of Honor awarded 'due' to the Iraq war,
this table is from the Wikipedia article on the subject. I didn't think the answer was there until I noticed that the table's right side was shy a bottom entry. This made me realize the column was chopped halfway down and made into a four column table instead of a two. If you read across to the right from Iraq War, you will see a 4. The table also progresses through time by going left to right, down, left to right, down, etc.

From Wikipedia, Medal of Honor:


from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor

This following info is from a linked article "List of Medal of Honor Recipients" indicating that it is the Department of Veterans' Affairs that is the keeper of the list:


(Sorry Wes, the bracket'code' didn't work ideally. Had to insert spacers for alignment. Will be bringing body of knowledge in for some body work.)

I consider "New Question" to be the most important game I play on here each day and my civic duty to play (just like voting in elections). Any score I get in the game is irrelevant, it's all about the ratings.

I have a simple rating system:
Good - "I should have known that" or "Gee, I wish I'd known that"
Poor - "May the brain cells I just wasted reading this be the first to die on my next visit to the bar"
Average - everything else

In addition, any question which requires viewing a SPECIFIC episode of a tv series, or about a minute detail of a book or movie gets an AUTOMATIC Poor (whether I know the answer or not). I only Google to make sure I miss the Poor questions and avoid accidentally getting them right.

59 guys during the Boxer Rebellion?! I had no idea!

Why would you purposefully ensure you get the answer wrong? This will just skew the % correct because you didn't like the question, but the ratings are for you to say whether you liked the question or not.

Of course these obscure questions will have enough players googling it for the RIGHT answer, so he's most likely not causing any damage with it. It's a rather unusual way of expressing disdain, but probably not one to be overly concerned about.

True enough! I just found it strange.

Actually, I think the best way to make this game more of a test of knowledge and eliminate the incentive to do research (which skews the results) would be to just give everyone the same number of points if they play and rate the game. Something like the International games where time and getting the questions wrong doesn't matter. There would probably have to be a minimum time for results to count (to keep people from just clicking through and not reading the questions). And the Mixed game could take this game's place as far as "Team of the Year".

Maybe we could have both - the main game with a certain level of competitiveness and a second one where interested players can play an extra 10 or 20 questions per day in Flash game mode (like the system-compiled quizzes) for some points with the majority of the score coming from just playing and rating and just a token amount for actually getting them right. Prerequisite to play that one would be to have played the NQG set already (so that the system would know which set NOT to give to the player).

The link to start that could be right at the bottom of the "thanks for your ratings" page with a "Want to play more new questions?" teaser.

Me too. I figure it's fair to have a question that assumes, say, that we know that Sheldon and Leonard are characters in "Big Bang Theory" but not a question asking what they did in a specific show.

My feeling is that to encourage rating quizzes or questions for a bonus becomes very problemetic for the reasons mentioned above. Would there be a way to give additional weight to those that have rated quizzes and questions over time? I do not even feel the weight criteria formula needs to be public. Just a thought.

I play the New Question Game everyday and always rate the questions. Many questions are absolutely great, a few are a bit "ho hum".

If people have gone out of their way to create questions, then at least we can show our support for this achievement by playing the game and rating the questions.

I really can't understand why people aren't playing this game, it's terrific

I play the game everyday too. I also take rating the questions seriously but I do wish we could have 4 catagories instead of 3.

I wont rate any 'poor' unless they're really bad but I also wont rate any 'good' unless they're really good which leaves a whole heap stuck in 'average'.

I would like to see an 'excellant' in there so I could reserve that for those really special questions but it would leave me more room to differentiate between all those stuck in my 'average' catagory of which some are very ho-hum (but people have put the effort in) to my quite good (but don't reach the level of those I put in my highest catagory).

I also think there is something not quite right about needing a certain percentage of people to get it right to be indicative of a 'worthy' question.

Surely with trivia the really important issue with a question is not who gets it right the first time they play it but who gets it right the SECOND time they do. This indicates that it taught us something and that that something was interesting enough for us to remember. That to me is a GREAT question.

I think that the point of needing a certain percentage of correct answers is to gauge where the question can fit into some of the hourly games. If a question has a large percentage of correct answers and a reasonably high rating it is suitable for the Easy Hourly (Piece of Cake) game, for example.

Most people who play that game regularly must have noticed that the question pool for some categories is woefully limited.

Nail on the head.

My understanding is that highly rated questions ("Good" ones) that are quite difficult do get used, just in different games. They're not eligible for the QQ badge, because the purpose of that badge is to encourage questions of moderate difficulty.

My view is that there is no point in trying to 'bribe' people to play or rate by offering an additional badge. It's not as if the questions never see the light of day - it just takes a couple of months for them to get into the system. I'd rather be patient and let the game run its course than have a question played and rated by someone whose only motive is to get to another badge(let). I enjoy acquiring badges myself, but I also play the various games for the pleasure of testing myself against other players even when there is no badge to aim for.

Getting better at these questions may however also more and more become an incentive in itself - after all, more games on site now use this pool and the NQG is a great way of starting down memorization lane.

I agree. A three-tier system leaves a lot of room for waffling, whereas a four-tier system forces a player to really consider: do I like this question or not? After that it becomes a question of how good/bad is it? (And I thought I'd never use anything from my Business Research Methods class!)

To the proponents of a more detailed system (which I consider a good idea) - which scores would you assign to the tiers? Right now, the system uses +1 (good), 0 (average) and -1 (poor), so any new system would have to either go to five tiers or leave players without a zero-value rating (to maintain compatibility, we need to make sure all different ratings add up to 0). The latter looks to be the bigger problem, so maybe go to five and use

+1.00 Excellent
+0.33 Above Average
+0.00 Average
-0.33 Below Average
-1.00 Poor

(It is intentional that the middle ones are closer together than the other ones - a setup with 0.5 values would likely lead to a bit of a score inflation. I am also avoiding the word "good" since having it as the 4th of 5 levels tends to compel many players to use it as their base score which would again lead to score inflation.)

Edit: As a side note - would you appreciate a user statistic that shows how your own average rating assigned developed over the last months (or a certain number of questions) so that you could track trends of being too generous or too stingy?

It could read something like "Over the last 500 questions you rated, you have assigned an average score of -0.21. You might want to consider being a bit more generous as a whole." or "Over the last 500 questions you rated, you have assigned an average score of +0.04 - a very balanced rating. Thanks!"

The five tier rating is very interesting. One drawback though: it can't be simply implemented for those questions already on the site, which have been quoted with only three options available.

The average rating one has given, might be a step too far if it would be visible on small numbers. After all, we want to have an *honest* rating, not one that approaches the average.

Backwards compatibility is one of the reasons I have designed it as it is - ideally, a question should by virtue of large numbers and average achieve a very similar result whether we use three or five tiers, the new system would just give the individual rater more options to fine-tune their score.

And yes, I would not want to see the average displayed on something less than 300 ratings - it would also only be a guideline to remind a player he might be too far off the normal standard and should possibly adjust their base level a bit to be fairer by being more comparable to other players.

I believe Terry addressed the complications of changing the NQG rating system about a year ago. I think it went something like : he can't arbitrarilly assign new ratings to old Qs, making them match any new system. Then it was added we can live with the way it is. I may be wrong but I recall something to that effect.

Member Daaanieeel posted this at the Triathlon thread. I hope it is okay that I've copy/pasted it here for h(er)im?

I think the 5 tier would be great Wesley - and the point system with it seems fair.

As for it not being able to be applied to old questions I think that is something that would just have to be acepted that this is an improvement for future questions.(And remember some of the old questions may have received a lower mark under this system too).

I can only see it being beneficial to anyone that writes the questions - an average can still be an average but the ability to have questions rated Above Average will help with their overall scores.

It would be interesting to know how you mark against other people - I know I'm a bit of a hard marker but just how hard am I compared to others? (And I wouldn't be such a hard marker if I had more options on rating LOL)

Although I would be interested to see my average rate (especially in quizzes per category haha), I don't think you should explicitly tell people to aim for this ball-park figure, whatever the average across all people turns out to be. You could mention what the average score is and what % each tier of rating gets (like 30% Excellent, 40% 'above average', etc.), but let people decide what to do with that info themselves.
You don't want people to 'flatten' their ratings: let's say the average rating will be between Average and Good, for example... you don't want people to think they have to rate average/good just to stay close to this ballpark figure, because then the rating system will lack construct validity - at the end of the day the focus is meant to be on the questions.

As long as the majority of people are consistent (and honest!) with how they rate and have a decent amount of variance the actual average score figure they hit isn't as important; the majority will be realistic. Some people might just have higher standards or their own way of voting - unless people are giving extreme ratings (ie majority very good or very poor, or excellent/Vpoor to virtually every question) then it's no big problem I think.

But, overall? The system works OK as it is. I'm not sure what the rating threshold for entry into quizzes is, because I've seen one of my old average rated ones in, although selection procedures may have changed since then. As long as there's a distinction between popular and unpopular, which there is, all is well.

If the old three level ranking system needs to be melded into a five level one, the second aspect of rating could be a adjunct determiner. Subrank the excellent/average/poor further by ranking downward based on the %correct. Top level (1 of 5): excellents with high %s; next (2 of 5): Excellents with low %s; third (3 of 5): average with high %s; Fourth (4 of 5): average with low %s; bottom (5 of 5): poor by all %s.

But the %age correct doesn't actually matter - questions with high %age correct can go in Piece of Cake, questions with low %age can go in Obscurity etc. The 55-95% "good question" range is just so people won't submit loads of really hard/easy questions.

Can you define a fairer method of breaking out a three tier system to fit into a five tiered one?

I think "Obscure" questions are taken from quizzes at the moment and the great/average/poor has nothing to do with them. I think the % is applied to decide the hourly PoC, Mixed, Smartest and Expert games. After the Qs are through the NQG, % correct can change but there is never another opportunity to lend feelings about goodness to Qs. I don't think there is any situation on FT that considers great/average/poor beyond the NQG. Isn't it just a measure to determine whether the author of the Q earns merit toward badges? If so, a 3 level system is just as good as applicable as a 5 tier one.

I thought it was Gold Member Madness that used new questions, not Obscurity. But that doesn't really matter anyway.



I think there is another reason, that if they get a low enough rating they don't go through to any game, but I could be (and probably am) wrong.

There are two thresholds in the "goodness" rating that are relevant for the future fate of a question and its author:

+0.00 is the minimum required to be used in any games. A question receiving more poors than goods will not be played.
+0.20 is the minimum for the question to be considered for the badges.

For your own questions, these are also the color thresholds. A question with a green quality rating counts towards the badge, a blue one is being played but not qualified for the badge and a red one has been voted off the island.

So the good/ave/poor is only part of the NQG and isn't considered when selecting a Q in any other part of FT?

Doesn't that make the ratings a bit... well, redundant?

I don't have any 'below 0' ratings on my 39 questions. I'm sure they're quite rare. Based on that, the 'quality/goodness' measure of NQG probably isn't being used much, in that case... (although the difficulty rating still applies.)

No. It is determined during the NQG and decides which questions will not be used in other games thereafter. Any "red" questions do not make it into the wild.

Actually, it probably means you are a good author who doesn't turn out bad questions. And giving you the exact ratings is a good thing - you can distinguish between a 0.21 and a 0.45 to see which styles of yours are most appreciated.

And out of 95 questions, I have 4 (3 were written in my first 10 or so). They are rare, but that's the point - we want most questions to go through to the hourly/daily games. Even in my case, only 1 out of 23.75 questions are eliminated.

Wesley, where are these colors you talk about coming from? I have never heard of a Q having a color applied to it before.

http://www.funtrivia.com/questionpost_me3.cfm

If you look to the right hand side of a question that's been played (doesn't matter how many times), you will see "User rating" at the bottom. In brackets "(good)", "(average)" or "(poor)" is written. Good is coloured (colored for Americans) green, poor is coloured red and average is coloured blue.

In answering my question in order asked,
don't you mean Yes it is only a part of NQG and No it isn't considered anywhere as a selection criteria outside NQG? (edit: meaning reds don't get out of NQG and into the SingleQ dB and therefore aren't part of the selectible field of Qs. If the dB has red Qs in it, isn't that asking for trouble?)

All my questions on the "My Contributions all accepted..." list are Some shade between dark blue and dark green. All my questions in "My Contributions - Rated" are done in black. I have never seen a red question. Are you referring to "Q#xxxxx" being in some color and not the Qs themselves? Where I do see "Q#xxxxx" on my "Recently Rejected Questions, the numbers there are in black (and well over a year old as to being 'recent').

TY Adam for bringing color into my life although it's still all a shade of black as far as I can see.

Yeah, I just thought it would have more of a functional value haha - not that it matters to me overly, but there are surely enough .2+ questions or even .1+ to showcase the really good ones.
My top rating isn't near .45, so I guess that's something to try and get closer to, as well as, of course, the badge for 50 which I am close-ish to.

FWIW: NQG has told me my approach to niche could do with a rethink. I think I'm improving on that front; though the 'Race' kickstarted the slight change in approach really.

Mehaul, the red ones probably correspond to the below 0.00 ratings, which are called 'poor' and not used outside NQG, as far as I am gathering. I guess you don't have any either!

Just to clarify, Wesley, did you mean to say that a question with a green quality rating is not disqualified for the badge? The way it reads now implies that all questions with a green rating count, regardless of difficulty. I've assumed that my questions with good ratings but less than 55% correct wouldn't count.
Not that it matters much for me since I've only submitted 19 so far.

Submitted Qs data base (dB).

Editors Accepted, awaiting NQG play dB.

NQG results dB.

Single Question dB (only the 'blue' and 'green' of NQG dB)

That should about be the flow of a question. Of course they could get held up and kept from advancing to the next dB in any of the first three dBs. Once in the SQ dB, there shouild be no change to rating of g/a/p, only % correct and I haven't even seen that reflected in my list at all and I know my SQs have been in various mixed quizzes. I can't believe it when said that later play effects % correct. I read the situation is that the Single Question dB is unchangeable in any rating regard.
So, g/a/p and % correct are only functional in the NQG and for the single NQG dB.

I don't see making changes to something that won't impact anything beyond NQG is going to change the playability of the NQG. Let me de-negativize that block of words, please. I do see making changes to something that impacts beyond the NQG will have an effect on its playability. Badges for rating, which would be outside the NQG db system and tracked on a player profile dB record will increase play in the NQG. More points for evaluating, which impacts that profile's total points scored and is outside the NQG dB system, should increase NQG play.

Asking to play extra NQs will effect the middle two dBs above, And would seem to set up a rule violation by allowing a player to rate twice. How difficult would writing the code that separates out individuals who have seen 1-2 questions of a set from the rest of the group who has seen 0 of the Qs? It would only be real time solvable by having as many sets as there are players (2 million?)

That's correct - I was always only talking about the goodness aspect of the questions. The difficulty is used to determine in which games the question can be used - we might well someday add a few QQ questions to the Obscure game once we have enough.

So yes: Green = Can qualify for badge if difficulty fits. Playable in a game of appropriate difficulty.
Blue = Just playable in an appropriate game, but never badge-relevant.
Red = Gone.

How is it possible to get a new question from a player that I know has not logged into the site for at least 9 months? After answering the question, rating it, and seeing who wrote it, I checked the status of this person as I recalled this person had been MIA.

It may have been in play in one of the mixed games, and had a correction note sent on it. This then puts it back into the new question rotation, as has been discussed elsewhere.

Has there been any more thought to adding four ratings instead of three to the new question game as discussed earlier in the thread?

I play this game every day and rate the questions (and have done since it began) but to be honest I'm getting bored of doing it because as it stands now it's pretty meaningless so whats the point?

I think that Wesley said it would be better to have five ratings (like we have with normal quizzes). Either way, I doubt there has been any more thought or there would have been more discussion.

I don't understand why it is meaningless. You rate questions. If they are rated badly they are binned. If they are rated high (and have a good %age correct) then they get the author one step closer to a badge. If you score well they go through to Piece of Cake (or something like that). If you score badly they go through to Obscurity (or something like that). Why is it meaningless?

You earn points. You can earn team points. You can even earn a couple of badges. If you don't care about questions being rated or authors seeing the fruits or their labours then that's fine (well actually it isn't - it's a bit selfish), but I would think you certainly care about points, team points and badges.

I think Midget40's point in saying it's meaningless is that almost every question ends up being average, if you reserve the other two ratings for questions that really stand out. I know that almost all my ratings are average. But that's all right - I'm saying that the question is OK, and that's the essential point of judgement.

Oh, okay. But if you are rating the poor questions poor and just answering the questions (the right/wrong determines which game it is put in), then you are at least helping a bit.

Thankyou Looney tunes that is what I was trying to say - sorry I didn't phrase it better.

I actualy care very much about the authors hard work which is why I keep pushing for more catagories. I want to be able to score half of my 'averages' higher than the other half so that those authors get more recognition and higher ratings (and a chance towards a badge if they're working towards one).

To me its meaningless because they are nearly all ending up in the average catagory and there is a HUGE difference between the quality of some of them.

Midget, I had the same problem, but by now I have simply adapted my standards and become more flexible in setting the levels. I have definitely picked up the habit to rate at least the best question "good" and the least good one "poor" in a set of ten (except in the rare cases that a set really has nothing to praise or criticize).

I usually go by the "was this an experience" criterion. A good question teaches me something, helps me into a solution on an otherwise obscure item or simply has entertaining info. On the other hand, a question linking two random items and not providing the slightest interesting fact about in either of them will be scored as poor.