Hear, hear! I need about an hour (for most of my quizzes - there have been a few exceptions) just to copy from my Word document into the template and proofread in editing screen then again in preview screen, and make those last little adjustments. That's after I wrote it, rearranged it, read it aloud for euphony, had a friend proofread the hard copy, checked again that the order of questions made sense, (and that I didn't change verb tenses as I was about to do in that last clause), and that all the red squiggles in the Word document were shortcomings in its dictionary, not my typing. Since it can take up to an hour or more to research each question in order to be sure that it is accurate, especially as regards the extra information (and different sources often give different bits of information, which has to be factored in), the hour or so between starting the template and submitting the quiz bears litttle resemblance to the time that went into it.

At the other end of the time spectrum, there's the Author challenge that has to be claimed and have its template set up, but which may then sit for a couple of weeks while I decide exactly how I am going to use it, and get the quiz written ready to place into the template. Once inspiration hits, I might actually write the quiz in a couple of hours, if it's a topic that requires little research. There is simply no way that information about the time between template creation and quiz submission has meaningful information.

What's more, it is the product, not the process, that should be judged. I have written quizzes that were on a topic so familiar to me that I was able to write the quiz in only a couple of hours. There have been others for which the research and planning took over 20 hours, often spread out over several weeks. Which ones are better? That's a matter of opinion. Just because I took a lot of time to write a particular quiz does not mean that I successfully achieved my vision for it.

Of course I wasn't meaning transcription time to be measured. But an editor would know if a week hold out on an anagram quiz template represented a week's worth of research, trial phrasing, reworking and information assembly. But otherwise, if a lengthy question, answer and info quiz was done in an hour and reads with errors to the editor as poor work, I would like some hint from the editor (in this case their time to write estimation) that the quiz was indeed thrown together without much thought. If the editor then gets the quiz reworked by the author, the time to submit would go up, it should be a better product and the editor would then be justified in increasing their estimate of time to write to the next level. Heck, it wouldn't even need to be a mandatory quiz suffix, but giving it to us now and then could help achieve better, more representative rankings.

Edit to add: If some that are doing ratings don't realize what it takes to write a quiz, a time tagged to it might make them more aware. A good question, answer and info c(sh)ould take at least a couple of hours alone. Multiply that by ten questions, adjust order if necessary, transcribe and then proof read again, a good quiz might take a day and I think an editor would have a measure of that intricacy. A rater then seeing a day was put into the product and, even though not a familiar topic to the taker, perhaps a better ranking would result. I see a time value shown would make it easier for us to also see the ones that didn't get that attention in their conception and help us to sort between poor, good and excellent.

Mehaul, I think you overestimate the editors' mindreading abilities. It is easy to tell when a poor quiz has not had enough time and effort put in - and players won't see it then. However, it may subsequently have many more hours of work put in before it can go online, and even then may just meet the minimum requirements. That quiz writer may have put in much more time than a more experienced author, familiar with the guidelines for the chosen category and dealing with familiar subject matter, who can produce an outstanding quiz in a few hours. Judge the product, not the time involved.

If you want editors to assign arbitrary times that relate to the quality of the quiz, that is like asking us to rate it before players see it, and that is simply not the way it works.

So...we should be basing our ratings on something that has very little to do with the quiz in the first place? What if someone copied the quiz from a Word document? We'd have no idea if it was submitted in under ten minutes after a years-worth of writing or an hours-worth.



I don't get this at all.



There's no way for us to know this; there's no way to know if an author is 'trying' or not because it's completely subjective. For instance we have a lot of English-as-a-second-language authors on here who need the extra help just to form grammatically-stable sentences. If these people are producing very basic quizzes for more-qualified English speakers, who are we to say 'this was put together with immense work and thought' or 'this was put together by someone who didn't really work with us'. And who are we to make that claim if they (A) don't tell us they're ESL or (B) go out of their way to seek help from other people on or off the site or (C) popped it into a Google Translator or (D)...on and on and on.



Amen.



I don't get why the 'estimated work' or 'time this took to get online' or 'effort factor' is relevant. Sometimes our more seasoned authors will discuss how long some of their quizzes have been waiting in the creation stage, sometimes as bits of paper on the side of their computer and sometimes in scraps written on cue cards on their nightstand-- and YEARS before they make it online in some cases-- but that's just a little tidbit that really has nothing to do with the quiz itself, I mean the cut-and-dried, finished, and final product, unless you decide that that's a factor that makes sense.

We're not telling you how to rate the quizzes by any means (like I said, a lot of this is subjective) but the goal is to get players to enjoy the 'FUN', quality trivia we place online in its (as I said) finished and final product.

You don't need to know what the editor corrected beforehand on other peoples' quizzes, or how long it took to do it, or even what the editor thought about it...or even which editor placed it online...or even if we all talked about it for weeks to get it categorized properly...or how many back-and-forth notes we had with the author to see it online. I don't think that's what most of our authors want you to focus on either, not because it will (or should) make or break the factors that allow you to rate the quiz, but because it's irrelevant.

I agree with everything that has been said so far. Even if we could overcome the difficulties inherent in measuring the time spent on writing a quiz, I still don't think that such information would be useful in deciding how to rate a quiz.

The quality of a quiz does not vary proportionately with the time spent writing it. Case in point: Most of the current Sprint quizzes are being written in a very short amount of time, and I have played many that are just excellent. It probably wouldn't make much difference if the author spent another month working on the quiz - the end result is already fantastic.

The other extreme would be quizzes that I have seen as an editor that have gone through multiple rounds of editing spanning months or even years before going online, and sometimes the end result barely meets the minimum requirements for the site. Should the quiz be rated 'excellent' just because a lot of time and effort was expended into making it? I'm not so sure about that.

People who are familiar with the subject but who type very slowly might need an hour and a half or even more to write the same 10 question quiz.

I finally got my second sunglasses! Weird, however, because both of my sunglassed quizzes went online on July 3rd (09 and 12).

I don't remember how long it took to type it, but its now ranked in the 20,000s.

I had a quiz with sunnies that I made back in 2006 when I first joined FunTrivia. The quiz still had sunnies when I came back a few month ago, but recently lost them. I'm thinking this is because it has been a long time since the quiz was regularly played, and other quizzes have just passed it in the rankings. It's still 23231 though, so it's close to sunnies! even if it doesn't have them anymore... *fake tears*.

It actually really doesn't matter that much to me where my quizzes are in the rankings as long as more people rated it Good and Excellent than they did the three ratings choices that I can't see. In my mind this is a win, because more people, who cared enough to rate my quiz, liked it than didn't. No one wants to make a quiz people don't enjoy, so a majority of positives is all I ask for.

I have two quizzes that I took an exceptional amount of time in composing, and just because they are marked as "very difficult," both of them are ranked in the 90,000's, yet I spent about five months putting the quiz together. I put a lot of research into both of these quizzes, yet neither are ranked well. The editor that placed them online enjoyed editing both of them, and liked how they came out. The first of the two was an Author Challenge, and I was able to make it work into a second quiz that I put together myself. It still took the better part of two months to do it, and, again, ranks very low due to the "difficulty" of the quiz. To me, they are the two best quizzes I've written, but the rankings say otherwise.

Not only did I learn quite a bit putting these two quizzes together, but I also tried to make it where the quiz taker would learn some things as well. If I score two on a quiz that I knew nothing about and ten on a quiz I know a lot about, the one I scored two on will get a higher ranking, just because the author took the time to put it together. Granted, I can't tell if it was posted into the quiz template in a matter of ten minutes, as quizzes can be written offsite in Word or some other text editor, so I can't necessarily base a rating on just that.

I'm not sure that the difficulty plays as much into it as you may think, though it is a possibility as to a lower ranking. From my own quiz creation experience, my harder quizzes (Very Hard and Difficult) have been ranked higher than my easier (still Tough) quizzes. There may be a larger variation/trend from Very Easy to Impossible than I get in my limited Tough to Very Hard quizzes, though, that you may be experiencing in yours quizzes (quiz naivety on my part in that case).

If you could post a link/links to the quizzes you talk about, I would love to take a stab at them. I've just completed an Author Challenge quiz myself, and know the work that goes into them and the new things that even the author learns along the way!

I agree 100%. It's a moot point anyway, as the editors have absolutely no intention of including that information in any way on the published quiz.

Please rate quizzes based on how much you enjoyed playing them. It's an inherently subjective process and that's just fine - that's the way we want it to be.

It has been said time and time again, and I completely agree, that the amount of time a quiz takes has no bearing on rating.

Check out this quiz of mine. Rated 1567.

Nov 25 08 [12:41 PM] : Quiz placed online for all to play!
Nov 25 08 [12:22 PM] : salami_swami : Quiz Submitted for Editor Review!
Nov 25 08 [11:40 AM] : salami_swami : Quiz Created

Notice that it took only 1 hour 1 minute to get it created, completely written, AND online. It is one of my highest rated quizzes.

Alternately, check this one out. It took me forever to write, as it was a difficult one for me to wrap my mind around to get the questions done. It is rated 98,822.

Nov 11 10 [10:59 AM] : Quiz placed online for all to play!
Nov 07 10 [7:28 PM] : salami_swami : Quiz Submitted for Editor Review!
Oct 15 10 [10:28 PM] : salami_swami : Quiz Created

Almost an entire month just for me to write it, let alone queue time of four days... And it wasn't rated very well.


So, just to agree with so many people who have already said so, I don't think writing time should be included at all. It means nothing, in my opinion.

I can't post them here as we cannot post the quiz titles themselves, but will send you one of the titles via PM.

Okay Maw.

Just a month to write? I had one simmer for over two years

Well, there was my quiz that took over a year, but it got a thumb, so... ;-)

I've had quizzes simmer for so long that the pan burnt dry ~~

While on the subject of the ratings system---

Does it make any difference whether the quiz is rated by a few dozen people vs hundreds or thousands? Obviously there needs to be enough ratings for the variability to settle down, but all else being equal should a quiz played by many more people necessarily rate higher than a niche quiz?

I've been curious for a while--not after the algorithm or anything, just a general idea.

I think not. If you look at the top 25 list, many of them are niche quizzes. So far as I know there is no weighting for numbers of players - a rating is a rating (except for some protection built in for quizzes which are part of a challenge, as that has been shown to be bad for ratings - the Bus Ride quizzes, for example)

The number of plays is a statistic that is kept, and you can find the quizzes with the most plays. This tends to mean that they are on popular topics, not necessarily that they are good quizzes. The really outstanding quizzes can be played by thousands, not just those with an appreciation for the niche subject, and still have lots of excellent ratings, but the rankings are based on percentages, rather than absolute numbers, of players giving each of the five possible ratings.

Cool; thanks for the explanation agony & looney tunes.

How I see the rank. I write a quiz a week ago and I don't see the rank. Thanks.

It's on the RH side of the quiz introduction page, underneath the three red arrows.

Joe, it usually takes about three weeks for the ranking to kick in. Your quiz went online on the 10th, so it will probably get ranked next Sunday night, FT time.

Thanks ozz.

In addition to the delay, there's another criterium. A quiz' ranking is only shown after at least 20 people have given their ratings.

And it stays marked as *NEW* until it gets 20 ratings. There are quizzes that were placed online more than a year ago that still have that tag.

It's rated by 58 players. Thanks.

Joe, it's now rated by a sufficient number of players, but as ozzz2002 stated above, you'll have to wait three weeks for a ranking to show, which would ideally be December 3, as rankings update on Mondays FT time.

Hi dave and ozz thanks. How I win the sunglass? I want for a summer day.