I think there is a problem with the character count function in the quiz editing program.

I was editing my quiz that had gone online earlier today. I emended the conclusion, and before saving I checked with a word processing program what the character count was. According to MS Word, there were only 496 characters including spaces.

So I hit "save", but guess what? The quiz was rejected by the program. So I deleted some words, and cut it down to 486 characters. Then it was accepted.

But this isn't right, because the limit is supposed to be 500, and I was certainly under it.

Here's the quiz:
"U.S. Events of the 1930s: What Didn't Happen?"
http://www.funtrivia.com/quizdetails.cfm?quiz=356474

I just copied your current conclusion to Word and did a count - it says 490 characters, not 486. That means there is some inconsistency in your character count, which could be enough for you to have had over 500 characters when you thought there were 496.

I personally always try to leave a margin of 5-10, just to be absolutely safe.

Hm. I wonder if perhaps the FT software is giving a slightly different count for the longer spaces? That is a technical matter, however, and beyond me.

I've just checked it out on a test template. The FT quiz editor counts 2 characters if you add a line break (paragraph). Word counts that as zero.

Yup, I tested it myself the other day, and discovered that Word ignores the newline characters, but I couldn't post because I was LOCKED OUT!

So, in the future, I will mentally add a newline character for each line to the total. Also looney_tunes' idea to keep a buffer is excellent advice.